All About Google

Pinging Tricks

2008-09-28T21:31:00.002-07:00

You’re a blogger and are constantly hearing about pinging. The thing is, you don't know what it is and what it can do for your blog. Well that's fine because a lot of bloggers don't quite understand pinging. In this newsletter, we will explain what pinging is, how it helps your blog, and what the best pinging services are. After you've read this newsletter, you'll know exactly how to use pinging to make your blog popular.

What is pinging?

When a blog is pinged, it essentially tells a web blog tracking system that the blog has been updated. Thus, pinging is the process of telling tracking services that a site has been updated.

So how does pinging work? Well, a ping service scans regularly blogs for updates. Whenever there is a new update for a particular blog, that is reported back to the pinging service’s site. You can almost think of ping services being just like search engine spiders—both scan sites looking for information, and both report that information back to their specific site. The difference is, a ping service only reports back new blog posts.

Why is pinging useful for my blog?

Pinging, in effect, tells people that there is a new blog posting available. Those who are loyal followers of your blog will see the ping and want to visit your blog. Those who haven’t read your blog before will see the ping and perhaps think “hey, there’s a new blog I haven’t been to before, I think I’ll check it out”. Pinging helps to increase your traffic because it tells people when your blog is updated. Those who visit sites with pinging services will see this information in the form of a scroll on the left or right side, or top of the page. The scroll is usually in XML format and typically includes the title and URL of your blog, as well as the date and time of the update.

OK, so now I know what pinging is. Who offers pinging?

The answer is, there are several pinging services available which you can use to have your blog pinged. We’ll go over some of them right now.

Weblogs.com

Weblogs.com is probably the most well-known pinging service. Weblogs.com monitors sites for updates and then pings whenever there is an update to report. Virtually every blog software is available to use Weblogs.

Yahoo’s Blo.gs

Another popular pinging service. This one is offered by Yahoo and has a built-in integration with movable type and other tools. One cool thing about this service is that it offers the ability to give out updates via Instant Messenging services like AOL and ICQ. It is a direct pinging service, so those who sign up for subscriptions to your blog will be sent an email anytime your blog is updated.

Blogrolling.com

Blogrolling allows its bloggers to manage their blogrolls (updates) through a web-based interface. Recently updated blogs are also highlighted on Blogrolling’s web site. Data is automatically retrieved from other sites like blogger.com and weblogs.com every 5 minutes. Often times your blog is already being pinged by Blogrolling, so you might not have to sign up for it. Search on the site first for your URL before signing it up.

Technorati

Available at http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, Technorati is another service that pings blogs. It gets its data from a variety of places and is definitely a site you should go to for blog pinging.

These are just 4 of the many different blog pinging services available. A quick search on Yahoo or Google will reveal many other possible blog pinging services to use for your blog. It is best to sign up for as many as you possibly can to ensure that your blog is well-pinged. A well-pinged blog will definitely help your blog attract more visitors. So sign up for as many as possible and watch your blog traffic increase.

Pinging tells people when your blog is updated. It is an incredibly useful, and easy to sign up for service, so be sure to sign your blog up for pinging!

How to clean your Mother Board

2008-09-28T21:31:00.001-07:00

If you have not done the inspection mentioned in the previous article - How to Clean your Case, now is the time to do so. Look at the blades of the fan in the back of the computer. Also look at any vents. Is there clusters of dust there? Is there grime caked on to it? If so, the inside needs to be cleaned. If the fan blades are clean but it has been several years since you have cleaned the motherboard or if the computer is around cigarette smoke, it probably should be cleaned anyway. Dust and particles in the air (like cigarette smoke) can build up on the circuitry of the motherboard and cause it to heat up and/or corrode.

The first thing that you need to do is unplug your computer. Then open up the case to get access to the motherboard. Cases open differently. If you don't know how to open your case, look on the back of your computer along the edge for some screws. These screws may hold on side panels or an upside down U shaped panel that covers the sides and top. Removing the screws will allow you to take off the cover. Other cases have the screws on the front of the computer. To get access to these screws, you must first remove the front panel by pressing a hidden latch. The cover is there to give easy access to the inside of your computer, so if you look hard enough, you should be able to figure out how to remove it.

Remember that if you touch anything on the motherboard, you should be grounded by either touching the metal frame of the computer with your other hand or by wearing a special grounding device.

The goal of cleaning the motherboard is to remove all dust and debris from the motherboard and all components inside of the case. This can be done using one of three methods.

The preferred method is to use a can of compressed air to blow it out. Always hold the can in an up-right position to prevent the propellent chemicals which can damage or corrode components from coming out. Dust and dirt should be blown away from the motherboard and out of the case.

Another way to remove dust is to use a vacuum. The common advice is to only use a battery operated vacuum because an AC powered vacuum causes static and static can ruin the motherboard. I have used an AC powered vacuum (before I knew that it was not recommended) to clean my motherboard many times and it has never caused any problems, but I may have just been lucky. When using the vacuum, keep the nozzle a couple of inches away from the motherboard or any other components so that it does not come in contact with them and so that any small parts are not sucked into the vacuum.

If you do not have a can of compressed air or a vacuum, you can use a dry cloth and brush to clean the motherboard. Be careful not to dislodge or break anything using this method.

While cleaning the motherboard, be careful not to unplug any cables or connections or to dislodge any loose components, such as, jumpers.

Methodically clean the whole inside of the case going over all of the motherboard from one end to the other and all other components. Don't forget to clean the fans and heat sinks. Do not open up the power supply box or stick anything in it beyond the fan. If you do, you could get a shocking surprise and ruin your computer.

If your computer does not work when you put it back together, something was obviously dislodged during the cleaning. Open the case back up and push all connections and cards into their slots. Look for anything that may have become disconnected.

Cleaning the motherboard is probably the most dangerous form of cleaning but it is necessary to prevent an early death of your computer.

The Super Duper Problem Fixer

2008-09-28T21:30:00.002-07:00

One of our customers pointed out a new program to me and wanted me to check it out. This program called itself a bug fixer. It was a sharp looking program and claimed to fix bugs on the user's computer that he didn't even know existed.

It sounded like a super duper problem solver until I downloaded it and took a closer look. Being a programmer I quickly saw behind its smoke and mirrors. It actually only performed six of the over 1000 cleaning processes which our A1Click Ultra PC Cleaner and RegVac Registry Cleaner do.

Even though it did little compared to our programs, it found 504 problems. How can that be? My computer was clean. The program did not show any details about the results but wanted $30 before it would clean them. I'll never know for sure about those results, but I suspect that they were fabricated and that the true number of problems was 0.

There are many shady developers out there that just want to make a quick buck. I doubt this bug fixer program will even be around in a year.

This provides a good lesson to anyone. Be sure to purchase software from a trusted developer and don't buy a program just because it looks nice.

We have been in the software business since 1996 and are continually improving our programs. You will not hear hype and lies from us. Our programs may not look that good on the surface, but under the hood they are super. When you purchase our programs, all future updates are free.

If you haven't tried RegVac Registry Cleaner and A1Click Ultra PC Cleaner, try them today.

Remote Blog or Self Hosted Blog?

2008-09-28T21:30:00.001-07:00

So you’ve decided to blog, but aren’t sure whether you should host the blog yourself or sign up for a free service like blogger.com. It’s a dilemma that many bloggers face. There are pros and cons to both, which makes the decision difficult for many. Neither is perfect, and neither is for everyone. Fortunately, you should be able to make the best decision for you if you are armed with adequate knowledge of both. In this newsletter, we’ll go over services like blogger.com and others, plus software that allows you to host your own blog. We’ll also go over the pros and cons of each. After reading this, you will know which is best for you.

Who offers free blog hosting?

Many sites offer free blog hosting. Among them are Forumer, Blogger, BlogEasy, Aeonity, BlogThing and Blogates. A quick search for “free blog” on Google reveals many possibilities.

What software can I use to host my own blog?

Like free blog hosting, there are many possibilities for software that makes hosting your own blog easy. Most of them are free to use. These include:

WordPress(the most popular software)
Apache Roller
Blosxom
Geeklog
Textpattern
LifeType

There is also blog software which you can purchase for use on your site. These include:

Community Server
Movable Type
Radio UserLand

One negative about using software and hosting your own blog is that the process can often times be complicated. You have to download the software and install it to your server, which doesn’t always go easily. It’s particularly hard for those who don’t have a lot of experience installing things on servers.

Why should I remotely host my blog at a place like Blogger?

Places like Blogger allow you to host your blog there. It’s a good option for many people.

The Pros

• It’s easy to set up and maintain a blog. You don’t have to go through the trouble of installing software and configuring it to work on your server. All you have to do is sign up for an account and start posting.

• It’s friendly for beginning bloggers. Sites that host blogs offer good tutorials on how to make your blog postings, so that even someone who is completely new to the concept of blogging can do it easily.

• Most blog hosting sites are completely free to use. There is no need to pay for things like a domain name and hosting.

• Monetizing your blog is easy. Rather than having to manually put HTML/Javascript codes on your blog to manually set up things like AdSense and Pay Per Click advertising, you can select an option on most blog hosting sites that does much of the work for you.

The Cons

• You don’t have as many options to customize your blog. Remotely hosted blogs are admittedly somewhat limited in terms of what you can actually do on them. You have to stick with what is provided to you in terms of look and features.

• The URL you get is always yourname.BLOGSITE.com. You don’t get to have a custom domain name like YOURNAME.com. This can possibly hurt traffic to your blog.

• Blogs hosted on free blog sites don’t look as professional as self hosted blogs.

Why should I self-host my blog?

The Pros

• You have more options and more flexibility. You are able to tweak the blog to your liking.

• Your URL is your address for your blog. Rather than having go to where your blog is hosted to read it, they can read it right from your site.

• The ability to make your blog look professional. Blogs that are hosted on sites of their own tend to look a lot better than those hosted on free sites.

• More space for your blog. Free blog sites usually place a restriction on how much space you have for things like photos and music. By hosting your own blog, you are able to use as much space as you need.

The Cons

• There are sometimes problems with setting up blog software to run on your site and server. If you aren’t experienced when it comes to working with mySQL, the process will be hard.

• Updates aren’t as easy to post.

• You have to manually set up programs to monetize your blog. However, if you are good with HTML/Javascript, this shouldn’t be too hard.

• You have to pay for your own hosting and domain

As you can see, there are pros and cons to both. Which should you choose? Well, it depends on who you are and what you intend to use your blog for. If you intend to use it for business, then a self-hosted blog is the best idea. If it’s a personal blog, then a free hosted blog will probably be fine for you.

Closely examine all of the pros and cons mentioned above. That way, you’ll be able to make the best decision for you!

How to Clean a Printer

2008-09-28T21:28:00.002-07:00

Does your printer have frequent paper jams? Does it put ink where ink shouldn't be? Is the outside of your printer dirty or covered with smudges? If so, it is time to clean your printer.

First, there are some general rules that apply to cleaning just about any electrical device. It is best to turn off the printer before cleaning it. Do not spray water or cleaner on or in the printer. Instead wet the rag with it and clean the printer with the rag.

Different types of printers require different cleaning methods. So if you can get your hands on cleaning instructions for your make and model of printer, do so and follow them. Unfortunately, many manufacturers only make that kind of information available to their licensed technicians. In that case, you are stuck with these instructions, so read on.

Open up your printer and take a look.

If you have an ink jet printer and there is an ink mess inside, clean it up with wet paper towels.

If you have a printer that uses toner either vacuum or blow it out. Some toner, especially color toner, can be harmful to you, so only use a vacuum with a micro-toner filter or blow and run. Figure out where the drum is (it is shiny and larger in diameter than the rollers) and do not touch or scratch it. If you do, the scratches will turn up as marks on every paper that you print and will require that you replace the drum (not a cheap option) to fix it.

Examine the path that the paper takes through the printer. Clean all of the rollers (but on a toner printer, not the drum or rollers near the drum and watch out for the rollers after the drum because they may be hot). It may take some disassembly and/or contorting of your arm to get to some of the rollers. Access is not always easy. The most important rollers to clean are the ones which pick up the paper from the paper bin and transfer it into the printer. If these rollers are dirty or bad, they will cause consistent paper jams.

The rollers are made of either hard plastic or rubber. All of the rollers can be cleaned with water or rubbing alcohol. If the rubber rollers have deposits that you can't get off, you can use harsher cleaners but be careful because those cleaners can damage the plastic rollers and parts.

To clean a roller, wipe across the roller with a wet rag, rotate the roller, and wipe again. Do this until you have worked your way all the way around the roller. Look at the rag. If it has been blackened by the roller, move to a clean part of the rag and clean the roller again.

Once everything is clean on the inside, close it up and clean the outside. Wipe off the case and each of the buttons or knobs. If there are staples or paper clips sitting on it or wedged in the cracks, remove them and throw them away.

Other areas of the printer can be cleaned but to do so, you will have to either get training and special tools or leave it to a trained professional.

How to Clean the Registry

2008-09-28T21:28:00.001-07:00

In the beginning Windows' registry consisted of two files totalling around 5mb in size. Today it consists of at least 12 files with the Software file itself being 30mb or bigger in size. As the size of the registry has exploded, so has the trash and clutter in it. It may seem like a daunting task, but cleaning the registry properly can fix system problems, speed your computer up, and make it run more efficiently.

I have spent many years developing and refining thousands of procedures to do just that. I could share these methods of hunting down the trash with you and let you find them and delete them by hand, but if you were to sit down at your computer right now and work nonstop, you would still be busy with them a week from now when the next issue of Ray's Computer Tips arrives. By then your registry would have new clutter and you would have to start all over again.

To make registry cleaning easier on everyone, I wrote a program called RegVac Registry Cleaner (http://regvac.com/regvac.htm) to perform those procedures. It has been so successful that several companies have asked me to model their registry cleaners after RegVac and even more have copied processes that first debutted in RegVac.

The first place RegVac cleans is the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT section (the Classes Vac in RegVac does this). This section contains settings for the classes of Windows. Think of a huge box full of snakes and you will get an idea of how complicated and interwoven it is. It is so complicated that many registry cleaners bypass it or simply perform surface scans of it. RegVac uses over a hundred processes to follow each tentacle of each class deep into this area and make sure that they abide by the rules.

Next RegVac validates the entries in 22 lists with 7 different methods (the FilesList Vac does this). This is a minor part of RegVac but the bulk of most other registry cleaners even though they usually do not clean all 22 lists.

Another part of RegVac, the Software Vac, which is unique to RegVac, finds old software sections in the registry and provides a way to remove that software's entire branch. Other registry cleaners only remove a few entries in this area often leaving huge portions of the registry that do nothing but take up space and get in the way.

Even more trash can be discovered in hundreds of stashes used to store data you will never use. Most registry cleaners do not even touch these. The Stash Vac lists these stashes and lets you go through and select which ones to empty out. Please use caution when using the Stash Vac because some of the items listed there may be important. For example, one folder in the Stash Vac lists places where data for international keyboards are stored. You probably will never use the data for Bulgarian keyboards, so you can remove it, but if you live in the US you may experience problems after removing the United States 101 keyboard. The items that you can safely remove are usually obvious.

Last but not least, when cleaning the registry, you should look for broken links to files on the computer (this is what the Bad Link Vac does). If a file is referenced in the registry but it does not exist on your hard drive, that is a good indicator that something is wrong. Many programmers start out writing a registry cleaner thinking all it has to do is check for these broken links and remove them. In fact, that is all many registry cleaners do.

Even though that is all they do, they often don't do it correctly. If you check the results of such scans, you will find out that many of the broken links are really good links. I spent several months refining this part of RegVac so that as far as I know it is 100% accurate. Despite this, please realize that some software enter broken links in the registry and require them to be there in order for them to run. RegVac skips the ones it knows about, but you still need to be careful with this part of RegVac.

RegVac has six more tools that clean even more areas: the Add/Remove Editor, the System Config Utility, the OpenWith Editor, the AutoComplete Editor, the Junk Keys Editor, and Registry Backup, Pack, and Restore.

Many of you already use RegVac but if you don't, you can downloaded a free 30 day trial of RegVac at http://regvac.com/regvacz.exe. For more information about RegVac Registry Cleaner go to http://regvac.com/regvac.htm. If you like RegVac, you can purchase it for only $29.95. All future updates are free.

Keep the Windows registry clean and running smoothly with RegVac Registry Cleaner.

How To clean your Case

2008-09-28T21:27:00.002-07:00

There is nothing wrong with leaving spills, dirt, and stains on your computer case. After all isn't that what the case is for, to protect the electronic components inside from spills and dirt? This is true, but there are still parts of the case that need to be cleaned and checked if you want your computer to live a long and prosperous life.

Unless you like looking at dirt everytime you look at your computer, you should go ahead and clean those spills, stains, and dust off of the case. You can do this with just about any cloth and cleaner. Do not use highly abrasive cleaners that might ruin or mar the surface and do not use solvents on plastic. A wet sponge will even work. Just make sure that the cleaner or any liquid does not seep into the inside through cracks and vents. If there is any possibility that you are going to get that messy, turn off and unplug the computer first and wait to turn it back on until any liquid has had a chance to fully dry.

After you have wiped off the outside, it is time for a little inspection. Look at the blades of the fan in the back of the computer. Also look at any vents. Is there dust there? Is there a lot of dust and grime caked on to it? If so, that is an indicator that the inside also needs to be cleaned (I will tell you how to do that in next week's article - How to Clean your Motherboard).

Some clean environments never have to have the inside cleaned. Some need it cleaned monthly. When I lived in Russia, even though I didn't notice it, the air was not clean. The fan on the computer would cake up with dirt and grime after about a month of use. And so I would have to clean the fan, vents, and inside monthly. If I had let it go for several months without cleaning, the fan would have stopped working and the computer would have overheated. Where I now live in the US, the air is clean and I have gone years without having to clean it. Again, the indicator of this is the blades of the fan and the vents. If they are dirty, they need to be cleaned.

You can do some of the cleaning from the outside. First, turn off the computer. Then get out the vacuum sweeper and using the hose, vacuum out the vents and the fan(s). If you have compressed air (you can purchase compressed air from your computer store), you may want to blow air in through the vents (or intake fan if you have one) to loosen the dust and suck it out using the vacuum. If there is still dust or dirt in the vents or on the blades of the fan, you can use a Q-tip to clean them.

If you do not have a vaccum, you can use compressed air alone. Always use short bursts to avoid moisture buildup. Start with the computer off and blow into every hole and vent. Then turn the computer on and blow everything except for the exhaust fan once again.

With the case clean, your computer will look nicer and with the fan and vents cleaned out it will breathe easier and run cooler.

A Guide on RSS Tool

2008-09-28T21:27:00.001-07:00

RSS is an abbreviation that has evolved into the following, depending on their versions:

• RDF Site Summary (also known as RSS 0.9; the first version of RSS)
• Rich Site Summary (also known as RSS 0.91; a prototype)
• Really Simple Syndication (also known as RSS 2.0)

Today, RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication', and it has the following 7 existing formats or versions:

• 0.90
• 0.91
• 0.92
• 0.93
• 0.94
• 1.0
• 2.0

RSS tools refer to a group of file formats that are designed to share headlines and other web content (this may be a summary or simply 1 to 2 lines of the article), links to the full versions of the content (the full article or post), and even file attachments such as multimedia files. All of these data is delivered in the form of an XML file (XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language), which has the following common names:

• RSS feed
• Webfeed
• RSS stream
• RSS channel

They are typically shown on web pages as an orange rectangle that usually has the letters XML or RSS in it.

RSS feeds can be used to deliver any kind of information. Some of these 'feeds' include:

• Blogs feed - each blog entry is summarized as a feed item. This makes blog posts easier to scan, enabling 'visitors' to zoom in on their items of interest.

• Article feed - this alerts readers whenever there are new articles and web contents available.

• Forum feed - this allows users to receive forum posts and latest discussion topics.

• Schedule feed - this allows users (such as schools, clubs, and other organizations) to broadcast events and announce schedule changes or meeting agendas.

• Discounts or Special feed - this is used to enable users (such as retail and online stores) to 'deliver' latest specials and discounted offers.

• Ego or News Monitoring - this enables users to receive 'filtered' headlines or news that are based on a specific phrase or keyword.

• Industry-specific feed - used by technical professionals in order to market, promote, or communicate with current (and prospective) customers and clients within their specific industries.

RSS feeds enable people to track numerous blogs and news sources at the same time. To produce an RSS feed, all you need is the content or the article that you want to publicize and a validated RSS text file. Once your text file is registered at various aggregators (or 'news readers'), any external site can then capture and display your RSS feed, automatically updating them whenever you update your RSS file.

RSS tools are useful for sites that add or modify their contents on a regular basis. They are especially used for 'web syndication' or activities that involve regular updates and/or publications, such as the following:

• News websites - as used by major news organizations such as Reuters, CNN, and the BBC.
• Marketing
• Bug reports
• Personal weblogs

There are many benefits to using RSS feeds. Aside from being a great supplemental communication method that streamlines the communication needs of various sectors, RSS tools and feeds can also have tremendous benefits in your business, particularly in the field of internet marketing.

RSS tools and feeds provide Internet users with a free (or cheap) and easy advertising or online marketing opportunity for their businesses. Below are some of the RSS features that can help make your internet marketing strategies more effective.

1. Ease in content distribution services. With RSS, your business can be captured and displayed by virtually any external site, giving you an easy way to 'spread out' and advertise them.

2. Ease in regular content updates. With RSS, web contents concerning your business can now be automatically updated on a daily (and even hourly) basis. Internet users will be able to experience 'real time' updates as information in your own file (such as new products and other business-related releases) is changed and modified simultaneously with that of the RSS feeds that people are subscribed to.

3. Custom-made content services. With RSS, visitors can have personalized content services, allowing them total control of the flow and type of information that they receive. Depending on their interests and needs, visitors can subscribe to only those contents that they are looking for (such as real estate or job listings).

4. Increase in (and targeted) traffic. With RSS, traffic will be directed to your site as readers of your content summary (or 1 to 2 lines of your article) who find them interesting are 'forced' to click on a link back to your site.

These are just several of the many things that you can do with RSS. The possibilities are endless, and they are all aimed at providing you with an effective internet marketing strategy for your business.

In the mean time, Good Luck on your journey to success…

OR if you would like to succeed immediately to create financial freedom working only 4 hours a week, check out www.secrets2internetfortunes.com.

AND for a Limited Time, you will also receive a FREE copy of a limited number of the amazing 60 page eBook “52 Highly Profitable Instant Online Business Ideas That You Can Steal As Your Own And Start Today On A Very Tight Budget!”, which is jam packed with so many ideas you can use to instantly create an automated income for life! That’s my GIFT to You as a way of saying thank you for reading my articles.

A Guide to RSS Aggregators

2008-09-28T21:26:00.002-07:00

One of the most popular features of Internet portals, websites, pages and even emails is a frame that features an organized list of news headlines and periodic updates from other web sources. Really Simple Syndication, formerly “Rich Site Summary” or simply, RSS makes this possible.

Most users visit a lot of websites whose content continually change, such as news sites, community organization or professional association information pages, medical websites, product support pages, and blogs. As Internet surfing became an intrinsic part of business and leisure, it became important to get rid of the very tedious task of repeatedly returning to each website to see updated content.

RSS easily distributes information from different websites to a wider number of Internet users. RSS aggregators are programs that use RSS to source these updates, and then organize those lists of headlines, content and notices for easy reading. It allows computers to automatically retrieve and read the content that users want, then track changes and personalize lists of headlines that interests them.

The specially made computer programs called “RSS aggregators” were created to automatically find and retrieve the RSS feeds of pre-selected internet sites on behalf of the user and organize the results accordingly. (RSS feeds and aggregators are also sometimes referred to as "RSS Channels" and "RSS Readers".)

The RSS aggregator is like a web browser for RSS content. HTML presents information directly to users, and RSS automatically lets computers communicate with one another. While users use browsers to surf the web then load and view each page of interest, RSS aggregators keeps track of changes to many websites. The titles or descriptions are links themselves and can be used to load the web page the user wants.

RSS starts with an original Web site that has content made available by the administrator. The website creates an RSS document and registers this content with an RSS publisher that will allow other websites to syndicate the documents. The Web site also produces an RSS feed, or channel, which is available together with all other resources or documents on the particular Web server. The website will register the feed as an RSS document, with a listed directory of appropriate RSS publishers.

An RSS feed is composed of website content listed from newest to oldest. Each item usually consists of a simple title describing the item along with a more complete description and a link to a web page with the actual content being described. In some instances, the short description or title line is the all the updated information that a user wants to read (for example, final games scores in sports, weblogs post, or stock updates). Therefore, it is not even necessary to have a web page associated with the content or update items listed -- sometimes all the needed information that users need would be in the titles and short summaries themselves.

The RSS content is located in a single file on a webpage in a manner not very different from typical web pages. The difference is that the information is written in the XML computer code for use by an RSS aggregator and not by a web user like a normal HTML page.

There are 2 main parts that are involved in RSS syndication, namely: the source end and the client end.

The client end of RSS publishing makes up part of the system that gathers and uses the RSS feed. For example, Mozilla FireFox browser is typically at the client end of the RSS transaction. A user’s desktop RSS aggregator program also belongs to the client end.

Once the URL of an RSS feed is known, a user can give that address to an RSS aggregator program and have the aggregator monitor the RSS feed for changes. Numerous RSS aggregators are already preconfigured with a ready list of RSS feed URLs for popular news or information websites that a user can simply choose from.

There are many RSS aggregators that can be used by all Internet users. Some can be accessed through the Internet, some are already incorporated into email applications, and others run as a standalone program inside the personal computer.

RSS feeds have evolved into many uses. Some uses gaining popularity are:

•For online store or retail establishments: Notification of new product arrivals
•For organization or association newsletters: title listings and notification of new issues, including email newsletters
•Weather Updates and other alerts of changing geographic conditions
•Database management: Notification of new items added, or new registered members to a club or interest group.

The uses of feeds will continue to grow, because RSS aggregators make access to any information that individual users like more convenient and fun.

In the mean time, Good Luck on your journey to success…

OR if you would like to succeed immediately to create financial freedom working only 4 hours a week, check out http://www.Secrets2InternetFortunes.com.

AND for a Limited Time, you will also receive a FREE copy of a limited number of the amazing 60 page eBook “52 Highly Profitable Instant Online Business Ideas That You Can Steal As Your Own And Start Today On A Very Tight Budget!”, which is jam packed with so many ideas you can use to instantly create an automated income for life! That’s my GIFT to You as a way of saying thank you for reading my articles.

Web 2.0 And Why You Shouldn't Fake Reviews

2008-09-28T21:26:00.001-07:00

The latest offering from Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares aired on Channel 4 last night, followed the somewhat disastrous adventures of ex-boxer Mike and his wife Caron Ciminera as they struggled to run the Fish & Anchor, a restaurant in Lampeter, West Wales. Whilst the couple's arguing appeared to better the food they were originally sending out (a mix of jarred sauces and home cook book trophy dishes) they did let slip on a fantastically poor bit of black hat optimisation, which I hope made all white hat SEOs laugh out loud.

If there was one lesson to take away from the show, it would be - Don't fake reviews!

In order to gauged the feeling of the local community for the failing restaurant come sports bar, Ramsay conducted a search on Google for the Fish & Anchor, to which he was presented with a range of reviews, two of which were rather suspiciously from a character calling himself Michael or Mike Burns.

On the Wales portal of the BBC website Burns had posted "Well i don't get excited about food too often, and having dined in Rick Stein's, and Gordon Ramsay's,I think i have found a better restaurant in West Wales". On the SugarVine website he also posted "what a fantastic restaurant for couples, and families. it seems to have everything, the food has to be the best i have eaten (home or abroad) this place will go far". Other online reviews echoed what has already been said, but with the dire state of the restaurant, its food, its reputation and its perception from both the local community and Ramsay itself, would it not be right to question who was telling the truth?

The restaurateur confessed to posting the reviews, his rational pointing to stimulating custom, however with any reactive strategy it requires a degree of foresight - and I am not sure he really thought through the wider ramification of posting these "inaccurate" reviews.

Firstly, a warning must be expressed. For example, if someone finds your restaurant or hotel via a positive (fake) review and they have a bad experience, there is a chance that they will post a true review to assist fellow users and generally have a rant. The initial seeding of this true review has the potential to lead to an onslaught of further reviews from other visitors who might not have otherwise posted. Don't forget the saying "people don't lead... they follow".

But how can you manage your reviews and ultimately what your customers are saying about you? Well first and foremost, address the problem(s)!

You wouldn't put a sticking plaster on a gun shot wound, so why think that a positive review about the quality of your food or the softest of your sheets is going to counteract the adversities of your customer service?

The customer is king, a point stressed by Ramsay, and one that should ring true for any business, after all, without them, where would we be?

By rectifying or at least making plans to manage any failings within your business, regardless of its size, will be the first step in managing your online reputation, but this is an area I will not going into comprehensive detail for this post. Instead, I will offer some simply pointers as to how to harness online reviews for good.

Sites like Trip Advisor, which boasts over 10,000,000 user generated reviews of various hotels, holidays and restaurants is gaining increasing weighting as an resource for honest and unbiased review and via its system of community recommendation it really has the power to drive custom, and in many instances, divert customer - the key factor being positive, and consistent reviews.

But if you do run a successful hotel or restaurant and wish to harness these social spaces, but wish to do so in a more ethical way than that demonstrated in Kitchen Nightmares than why not encourage your diners of hotel guests to post a review after their stay.

When the customer is paying their bill or even booking their hotel room why not take their email address, or even ask them to submit their business card in return for entry into a monthly prize draw for a free meal in the restaurant?

In addition to building up a client database by collecting this data - for use in promotional mailings including notifying customers of events, promotional and the launch of a new menu - you can also harness it to stimulate online reviews by dropping your customers a short email after their stay / meal, which might look something like the following example...

"Good afternoon Simon, and thank you very much for your booking at the Leapfrogg Restaurant, we hope you had an enjoyable meal.

We pride ourselves on the quality of our food and our attentive staff however we're always striving to enhance and improve what we do, and as such we would appreciate you taking two minutes of your time to write a review for us at Trip Advisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com), a free travel guide and research website that allows users to post review and ratings.

Your comments are important to us, and will be used to improve the Leapfrogg restaurant.

Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to welcoming you again to the Leapfrogg restaurant in the near future.

Sincerely,

A Restaurateur
Leapfrogg restaurant
Brighton
Tel: 01273 669 450"

Of course, many of your requests will be ignored, but providing you are personal in your emails (a point we at Leapfrogg have mentioned previously in this blog) then you are more likely to get a response, and even if you only have a 5% success rate, this is still 5% of valuable customer feedback.

A point to which I will conclude this article is one which has stuck with me from London's SMX, and one that I will most certainly be repeating from here on out is that "Yesterday's news no longer wraps today's fish and chips". Online news and online content, including user generated reviews do not simply get binned like a newspaper at the end of the day, but they remain live, and can even appear within the search results for a brand keyword search... so isn't it worth paying attention to what your customers are saying?

Internet And Business Online – The Act Of Interdependence

2008-09-28T21:25:00.000-07:00

The best role of business online is that of interdependency. We’ve all heard the old saying, “No man is an island.” When it comes to online business this is especially true.

If a business owner who takes their business into the online world determines they will be self reliant and never accept the help of anyone then that individual will not be in business long enough to change their minds.

It is accepted fact that the greatest tool for long-term exposure to your website is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Without it potential customers can’t find you. It is unreasonable to expect that you can adequately develop a website without optimizing your website for the best possible search engine ranking.

Search engines also place a high value on sites that have links placed on existing sites. These ‘backlinks’ demonstrate to search engines that others trust your site. By placing your link on their website these other businesses indicate a trust and recommendation for your site.

In effect the two strategies listed above rely exclusively on what others can do for you when it comes to your online business.

Shirley Temple once proclaimed in her movie Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, “I’m very self-reliant.” American westerns are filled with lines dealing with pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and holding down the fort. Many of us have grown up to believe if we want something done right we have to do it ourselves.

This thinking is in opposition to the rules associated with an online business.

The online world can only exist because people share. Individuals share technology, but the also share links, reviews, blogs, forums and a wide range of other marketing strategies that find a commingling of interdependency.

In online business you are as dependent on others as they may be on you. Unlike the word ‘dependent’, the term interdependent indicates a mutual dependency. In other words you are depending on others to help provide links back to your site while they are equally dependent on you (or others) for the success of their business.

Have you really taken a proactive approach to networking? It’s possible you are reading this today and you’ve never considered asking someone else to place a link to your site on his or her online business site.

It can feel awkward depending on others to achieve online success especially if you’ve been lead to believe reliance on others is also a sign of imposing on their otherwise brilliant generosity.

I suppose it could be a deep-seated sense of pride that makes it hard to consider the need to ask others for help. However, the truth is depending on others is really what has made the Internet possible. The growth of this online world is comprised of a link of computers, networks and servers that are connected in a way that provides the maximum benefit for all.

Building an online business can feel a bit like trying to build a house of cards. Without the ability to rely on the other ‘cards’ around you it is virtually impossible to build.

Interdependence. This is the essence of online business.

The Battle of the Browsers – The History and the Future of Internet Browsers

2008-09-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

With Internet Explorer 8 now available, can Microsoft hope to retain market dominance over fierce open source rivals such as Mozilla's Firefox or the feature packed Opera web browser. Can history give us a clue to what the future of web browsers/browsing might hold? How did Netscape Navigator go from having a dominant 89.36% market share of all web browsers in 1996 and yet only 3.76% by mid 1999?

Let us take a journey that will begin long before even the intellectual conception of Internet Explorer, that will glance at its long defeated rivals, examine the current browsers available and will end with a prediction of what the future of browsing will offer us – and which browser(s) will still be around to offer it.

People often think that Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser since the golden age of the internet began. Well for a very long time now it has indeed been the most popular browser and at times been almost totally unrivalled. This was mainly a result of it being packaged free with Microsoft Windows, in what some would later call a brutal monopolisation attempt by Microsoft. The last few years however have heralded the arrival of new, possibly superior browsers. Mozilla's Firefox has been particularly successful at chipping away at Explorers market dominance. So where did it all begin, and why were Microsoft ever allowed to have a hundred percent market dominance?

Origins

The truth is they never did have total dominance, but at times they have come very close. Microsoft actually entered the Browser Battle quite late on. Infact a man named Neil Larson is credited to be one of the originators of internet browsers, when in 1977 he created a program – The TRS-80 - that allowed browsing between “sites” via hypertext jumps. This was a DOS program and the basis of much to come. Slowly other browsers powered by DOS and inspired by the TRS 80 were developed. Unfortunately they were often constricted by the limitations of the still fairly young internet itself.

In 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel created a simple, fast browser called Hytelnet, which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogues of over five thousand libraries around the world – an exhilarating taste of what the internet, and web browsers, would soon be able to offer.

In 1989 the original World Wide Web was born. Using a NeXTcube computer, Tim Berners-Lee created a web browser that would change how people used the internet forever. He called his browser the WorldWideWeb(http://www., which is still likely to sound familiar to internet users today. It was a windowed browser capable of displaying simple style sheet, capable of editing sites and able to download and open any file type supported by the NeXTcube.

In 1993 the first popular graphical browser was released. Its name was Mosaic and it was created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. Mosaic could be run on both Unix, and very importantly, on the highly popular Microsoft Windows operating system (incidentally it could also be used on Amiga and Apple computers). It was the first browser on Windows that could display graphics/pictures on a page where there was also textual content. It is often cited as being responsible for triggering the internet boom due to it making the internet bearable for the masses. (It should be noted that the web browser Cello was the first browser to be used on Windows – but it was non graphical and made very little impact compared to Mosaic).

The Browser Wars - Netscape Navigator versus Internet Explorer

Mosaic's decline began almost as soon as Netscape Navigator was released (1994). Netscape Navigator was a browser created by Marc Andreessen, one of the men behind Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was unrivalled in terms of features and usability at the time. For example, one major change from previous browsers was that it allowed surfers to see parts of a website before the whole site was downloaded. This meant that people did not have to wait for minutes simply to see if the site they were loading was the actual one the were after, whilst also allowing them to read information on the site as the rest of it downloaded. By 1996 Netscape had almost 90% market dominance, as shown below.

Market Share Comparisons of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer from 1996 to 1998

....................Netscape.......IE
October 1998..........64%.........32.2%
April 1998............70%.........22.7%
October 1997..........59.67%......15.13%
April 1997............81.13%......12.13%
October 1996..........80.45%......12.18%
April 1996............89.36%.......3.76%

In these two years Netscape clearly dominated the internet browser market, but a new browser named Internet Explorer was quickly gaining ground on it.

Microsoft released their own browser (ironically based on the earlier Mosaic browser which was created by one of the men now running Netscape), clearly worried about Netscape's dominance. It was not so much the worry that it would have a 100% market share of internet browsers on their Windows operating system, but more the worry that browsers would soon be capable of running all types programs on them. That would mean foregoing the need for an actual operating system, or at the most only a very basic one would be needed. This in turn would mean Netscape would soon be able to dictate terms to Microsoft, and Microsoft were not going to let that happen easily. Thus in August 1995, Internet Explorer was released.

By 1999 Internet explorer had captured an 89.03% market share, whilst Netscape was down to 10.47%. How could Internet Explorer make this much ground in just two years? Well this was down to two things really. The first, and by far the most important was that Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer in with every new copy of Windows, and as Windows was used by about 90% of the computer using population it clearly gave them a huge advantage. Internet Explorer had one other ace it held over Netscape – it was much better. Netscape Navigator was stagnant and had been for some time. The only new features it ever seemed to introduce were often perceived by the public as beneficial for Netscape's parent company rather than Netscape's user base. (i.e., features that would help it monopolise the market). Explorer, on the other hand, was given much attention by Microsoft. Regular updates and excellent usability plus a hundred million dollar investment would prove too much for Netscape Explorer.

2000 – 2005

These years were fairly quiet in the Battle of the Browsers. It seemed as if Internet Explorer had won the war and that nobody could even hope to compete with it. In 2002/2003 it had attained about 95% of the market share – about the time of IE 5/6. With over 1000 people working on it and millions of dollars being poured in, few people had the resources to compete. Then again, who wanted to compete? It was clearly a volatile market, and besides that everybody was content with Internet Explorer. Or were they? Some people saw faults with IE – security issues, incompatibility issues or simply bad programming. Not only that, it was being shoved down peoples throats. There was almost no competition to keep it in line or to turn to as an alternative. Something had to change. The only people with the ability and the power to compete with Microsoft took matters into their own hands.

Netscape was now supported by AOL. A few years prior, just after they had lost the Browser Wars to Microsoft, they had released the coding for Netscape into the public domain. This meant anybody could develop their own browser using the Netscape skeleton. And people did. Epiphany, Galeon and Camino, amongst others, were born out of Netscape's ashes. However the two most popular newcomers were called Mozilla and Firefox.

Mozilla was originally an open sourced project aimed to improve the Netscape browser. Eventually it was released as Netscape Navigator 7 and then 8. Later it was released as Mozilla 1.0.

Mozilla was almost an early version on another open source browser, Firefox. With it being an open source the public were able to contribute to it - adding in what features it needed, the programming it required and the support it deserved. The problems people saw in Internet Explorer were being fixed by members of the open sourced browser community via Firefox. For instance, the many security issues IE 6 had were almost entirely fixed in the very first release of Firefox. Microsoft had another fight on their hands.

2005 – Present

Firefox was the browser that grew and grew in these years. Every year capturing an even larger market share percentage than before. More user friendly than most of its rivals along with high security levels and arguably more intelligent programming helped its popularity. With such a large programming community behind it, updates have always been regular and add on programs/features are often released. It prides itself on being the peoples browser. It currently has a 28.38% market share.

Apple computers have had their own browser since the mid 1990's – Safari - complete with its own problems, such as (until recently) the inability to run Java scripts. However most Apple users seemed happy with it and a version capable of running on Windows has been released. It has had no major competitor on Apple Macs, and as such has largely been out of the Browser Wars. It currently holds a 2.54% market share and is slowly increasing.

Internet Explorer's market share has dropped from over 90% to around 75%, and is falling. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft will attempt to regain such a high market share.

Opera currently holds 1.07%.

Mozilla itself only has a 0.6% market share these days.

The Future of Web Browsing

Web browsers come and go. It is the nature of technology (if such a term can be used), to supplant inferior software in very short periods of time. It is almost impossible for a single company to stay ahead of the competition for long. Microsoft have the advantage of being able to release IE with any Windows using PC. That covers over 90% of the market. They also have the advantage of unprecedented resources. They can compete how they wish for as long as they wish. So there is no counting IE out of the future of web browsing.

Safari is in a similar position, being easily the most popular Mac web browser. Its long term survival is dependant upon Apple and the sale of their computers.

These are the only two browsers that are almost guaranteed another five years of life, at least. Firefox may seem like another candidate, but the public is fickle, and one bad release, or if it seriously lags behind the new Internet Explorer 8 for long, could easily see its popularity quickly descend into virtual oblivion.

However, it seems likely community driven browsers, such as Mozilla and Firefox, will be the only types of browser capable of competing with the wealthy internet arm of Microsoft in the near future.

As for web browsing itself, will it change any time soon? Well it already has for some online communities. For example, if you want to buy clothes you could try entering an online 'world' creating an online virtual You to go from 'shop to shop' with, looking at products and trying/buying what you see. Some 'worlds' allow you to recreate yourself accurately including weight and height and then try on things apparel such as jeans to give you an idea of how you would look in that particular item.

Will 'worlds' like this destroy normal web browsers such as IE ? - It seems unlikely. Traditional web browsers provide such freedom and ease of access that it is hard to see any other alternative taking over. However they are part of the new, 'thinking out of the box' wave of alternatives that some people will find attractive, and really who knows what the future will bring.

How to write Killer Classified Ad Copy

2008-09-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'll never forget what my accountant said five years ago when he saw the ad I wrote for my services: "How many scotches did you drink before you wrote this?"

He was kidding about the scotch. But he just couldn't believe anyone in their right mind would write such a bold and outrageous ad for their own writing, consulting and speaking services, as I had.

Well, I spent $300 on that ad -- $200 to run it in a local trade association directory, and $100 to have it reprinted as a flyer.

The following year, that $300 ad turned into $12,341 in new business for me. And $12,341 was just a tiny fraction of my total business that year.

Why did I make so much money myself while there were so many thousands of "starving writers" in the world? The answer may surprise you. You see, it's not because I'm a better writer. It's not my schooling. Not my resume. Not any talent I was born with.

It's all because I learned how to write "killer copy."

How do you write killer copy?

You start your killer copy with an emotion-packed opening statement that will get the attention of your reader. This opening statement may be:

* a headline

* an opening sentence

* a subject line on an email

* the header on a Web page

... or for that matter, the opening words in a telemarketing script, radio commercial, or TV spot. What's important is that you understand - your first words count for everything - because you must captivate peoples' imagination with those words in order to keep their attention.

Here are examples of opening statements from actual successful marketing pieces:

a) "Take the luxury vacation of your dreams at a reduced cost because of this special offer" (from a travel agency's letter to business owners.)

b) "How to stop overwhelm before it stops you" (from a personal coach's ad aimed at stressed-out overachievers)

c) "Why almost every financial statement in family court may not disclose the full net worth of the opposing spouse" (from an investigator's sales letter to divorce lawyers.)

Then, after your emotion-packed opening statement, you just

a) Make a promise

b) Back it up with convincing proof and

c) Ask for action

Let's look at how you do each of those three techniques.

1. Make a promise. The letter about luxury vacations starts with these words:

"Imagine taking your winter vacation knowing you aren't spending a penny more than you have to - secure that you have a team of travel experts making sure every little detail of your vacation goes smoothly. "Here's how you can have that vacation right now: Take advantage of an unusual promotion our company is doing. Let me explain."

Pretty exciting, right? Even if you don't think so, the people who got the letter did - because the letter produced an amazing $5 million in sales for the travel agency.

2. Back it up with convincing proof. The personal coach's ad for stressed-out overachievers, the one that begins "How to stop overwhelm before it stops you," contains this proof:

* 3 case studies,

* 3 testimonials,

* detailed credentials of the coach

* and a money-back guarantee.

Despite its stunningly bold claims, the ad comes across as very believable and has generated a record-breaking parade of new clients.

3. Ask for action. The investigator's sales letter to divorce lawyers, beginning "Why almost every financial statement in family court may not disclose the full net worth of the opposing spouse," ends this way:

"I would like to meet with you at no charge to show you how I can be of service to you and your clients in future family law cases.

"Please call me at your convenience so we can set up a meeting to discuss further how I can assist your clients recover their fair share of assets. Call me directly at xxx - xxx-xxxx."

Killer copy always asks for action in the most powerful way possible. Notice how the above words spell out exactly what to do, and even make a big promise - that the lawyer reading the letter will recover more money in court for their clients (and, therefore, get more money themselves).

As you can see, a few words of killer copy can lead to massive amounts of money. In fact, many people say writing killer copy is the single most valuable money-making skill in the world.

And recently, writing copy was named as one of the top 10 emerging professions for the new century.

It doesn't surprise me. In the age of the Internet, the old style of advertising copy -- saying something clever, and hoping people remember - just doesn't cut it anymore.

Besides, these days, with business-to-business advertising growing so fast, the traditional advertising industry is feeling a lot of pressure for ads that really produce results. Why? Because, old-style advertising that entertains, but does not sell, is not cost-effective enough for many companies in today's hyper-competitive market.

Recently I heard from my former accountant. (A few years ago, he left accounting to start a new business.)

He asked me if I wouldn't mind sharing some ideas on how he could write killer copy for his own business.

I said sure. And now he's on his way to doing the same thing that I do, for himself.

Funny thing about the conversation we had the other day. Unlike the conversation we had back in 1995, he didn't kid me about drinking scotch, or anything else. Maybe he finally realized that when it comes to increasing your income, killer copy is serious business.

I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

Are Keywords Destroying the Flow of Your SEO Copy?

2008-09-26T07:59:00.000-07:00

With all the shuffling that’s been seen in the search engine world within the last year, the issue of obvious optimizing has become a hot button. The current line of thinking is that most engines (especially Google) are on the lookout for sites that purposely make an effort to optimize their pages in order to get high rankings. While this theory has not been proven, I agree that obvious optimization is not a good thing. Not exclusively because of what Google might think, but because of what your site visitors might think.

When a Web site is created with the intent of having it ranked highly, one thing often happens. The focus gets placed solely on the optimization and is taken almost completely away from the visitor. This leaves your site in a dangerous state of unbalance. Let’s take a look at some examples.

New Orleans Web Design

Our New Orleans Web design firm offers a high level of creativity to businesses located in the general area. Our New Orleans Web design styles are never made from templates. Each New Orleans Web design is a custom creation just for your site.

I can’t count how many times I’ve visited Web design sites that were targeting local audiences and found copy similar to this example. Forget for a moment that this copy is completely “me, us, we, our” centered, and let me ask you a question.

If someone asked you what your company did would you say, “Web design” or “New Orleans Web design”? Yes, I know the keyphrase is “New Orleans Web design,” but using that phrase interchangeably with “Web design” shatters the flow of natural language. Breaking up that phrase will help you retain your appeal to the engines and your site visitors. It will also keep you from appearing to be over optimized.

You’ll also want to vary your terms to avoid absolutely bombarding the reader (and the engines) with the same keyphrases. That *may* mean the need for longer copy *if* your target audience is one that would respond well to longer copy.

Try this instead:

Progressive, creative, upbeat. Those are phrases that best describe many online businesses based in New Orleans. Web design for your organization should match your style. Never created from templates, the site designs you’ll receive will be truly reflective of your corporate personality. Because we work exclusively with companies located in or near New Orleans, Web designs retain that Big Easy feel.

See the difference? By breaking the phrase up, you work with the flow of natural language instead of against it. To your site visitors and the engines, it appears the phrase is just part of a written conversation instead of something that has been purposely (and carelessly) tossed in for the sole benefit of higher rankings.

So, is the flow of your current copy destroyed by keywords? Are you scaring off both the engines and your visitors? One quick check can help you decide. Read your copy out loud. (Or better yet, have someone else read your copy out loud.) Does it sound odd? Does reading it feel forced or stiff? Would the sentences you’ve written in your copy seem out of place in the course of a verbal conversation with someone? If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, you might better take a closer look at your Web page.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Still The Only Alternative?

2008-09-26T07:58:00.001-07:00

Is Pay-Per-Click The Only Way to Get Traffic?

Not long ago, I relied on pay-per-click advertising to sell my products. It was very effective then because the bidding wars that have rocketed the cost of campaigns hadn't happened.

When I came across it, I decided to test it out by making a comparison test with 2 other popular pay-per-click search engines.

In addition to the steep learning curve, it can also be expensive and psychologically damaging, as shafts of regret accompany a sense of having taken oneself for a ride by the over-liberal use of broad keywords. Yes one gets a lot of clicks, but sales do depend on whether the attracted traffic is targeted to the product.

Yes, pay-per-click is a step ahead of blind blanket advertising, but the rising costs force busy web marketers to consider other ideas too. At least, that's my view. Especially when there are alternatives that have ditched keywords in favor of targeted traffic from a network of sites.

It is a form of advertising known as "contextual advertising". My ads were shown on a network of sites instead of as the result of queries on a search engine. I spent $200 on each campaign to promote my e book 'Cash From Your Camera' (http://www.cashfromyourcamera.com)

This is what happened....

First, for the Google traffic, my average cost per click was 45 cents for the range of different keywords I was bidding on. I received a total of 449 visitors and 1 order. I also received 20 sign-ups to my newsletter providing a sign-up conversion rate of around 4.4% and ROI of 43%

Kanoodles's traffic was disappointing although much cheaper. I actually received 1523 visitors for my $200 investment. This works out at less than 8 cents a visitor for the same keywords. But the campaign resulted in zero sales an only 2 sign-ups to my newsletter...not good!

Have Traffic was the real surprise package.

I received 1,000 visitors for my $200 and actually received 3 sales and 46 subscribers to my newsletter. The actual return on my investment was a 135% plus I received 46 leads with which to follow-up.

Only one of my three campaigns even broke even and that one only earned 135% ROI. I obviously need to optimize everything a bit better and then I could at least get a profitable return from both Google and Have Traffic. It really looks like Kanoodle is a bust no matter what I do. It's a shame. In the distant past, I could count on decent traffic from them.

I guess it's possible that the results may have been different if I had used different keywords for the campaigns

But overall, this test shows that it is still possible to find cost effective pay-per-click advertising. You just have to look harder (sometimes at unexpected sources) and optimize your ad copy quite a bit more than was necessary in the past for even solid known good sources of traffic like Google.

For those of you who don't know what an FFA site is, it's basically a website where you can post a link/add to your website for free. Generally it is

2008-09-26T07:57:00.001-07:00

If you are in Internet marketing or have been reading the ads all over the Internet about how to make money from your website you can't have missed all the talk of AdSense. This is one of Google's main revenue generators and over the few years it has been around has made quite a few early adopters a lot of money.

Google makes a percentage of the cost of the ads and the website owner where the ads show up makes the remaining percentage. The AdSense ads are actually the ads placed through Google's AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising program.

Unfortunately as with all good things it seems, the money making potential seems to have diminished for the majority of those trying to make a go of AdSense as a viable money maker. That is not to say you can't make money off the AdSense program, it's just not as easy as it apparently was. Unfortunately I was not one of those who made good money off AdSense ads.

Regardless of all the ads promoting really big money from AdSense and the fact that there are still people collecting big profits from it, let's look at it through the eyes of someone just getting into the program in earnest. Someone like many of us that do not have a large source of traffic, or maybe even no traffic to sites we want to add AdSense to. In many cases we might have sites made specifically to be monetized with AdSense. Is it worthwhile to have sites specifically designed to make its income from AdSense ads? I say sites because it is not logical to think someone with a site that does not yet have a huge amount of traffic to believe they can make lots of money from a single site with AdSense on it.

Not going into details, the Google AdSense program is where a website owner has joined the AdSense program and allows Google to place AdSense ads on their website. When a visitor to the website clicks on an AdSense ad the website owner makes a few cents to many dollars from that click. How much you make is dependent on several factors such as the market the ad is trying to capture clicks from, the efficiency of the ad, the keywords the ad is focusing on and other factors. Certain types of ads almost always pay more per click than others. Insurance, loans, and finance ads pay a lot more than an ad for garden tools or gift baskets or paper plates, etc. would pay.

Real Life Example

I decided to give AdSense a try and see if I could make an average of $5 a day from a site designed to be monetized with AdSense ads. The sites are essentially sites with articles on them based on the theme of the site. I wrote some of the articles but purchased most of them. Articles to be added to the sites in the future will be mostly purchased due to lack of time to write articles myself. They are the content of the sites. The sites are mostly written in html, although I do have a few that are php coded sites.

On the pages with the articles are the AdSense ads, usually three blocks of ads on a page. The sites are small with most being about nine to 15 pages total. Adding articles on a regular basis will slowly build up the sites over time which is what the search engines want to see. I started with twenty new AdSense sites and three older blog sites I already had, plus two new portal sites that had no traffic going to them. All sites were monetized with AdSense.

The AdSense sites cost nothing, but the few articles on each site cost about eight dollars each. Articles can cost from about twenty-five cents to fifteen dollars or more depending on the source and quality. The lower cost articles require considerable rewriting so as not to cause your article to be considered a duplicate article and incur a so-called duplicate content penalty.

Allowing for placing five articles a month on a site plus some miscellaneous costs like hosting, domain name, software, and potential maintenance costs, a fifty dollar monthly cost per site is incurred. Yes you could write all or most of the articles yourself, but that is not practical if you have many sites and is very time consuming. So I am discounting that solution as impractical if you have many sites. So to break even on these types of AdSense sites each site needs to make about $50 a month. That’s an average of $1.70 a day.

A measly $1.70 a day, that should be easy for a site to make. Maybe it is, but it is heavily dependent on the traffic to the site and the corresponding clicks on the AdSense ads that result from it. To put things in perspective, look at the results of my twenty AdSense sites, three blogs, and two portal sites. All sites except the three older sites have been up slightly over three months. I started getting a few links to each site just this past month.

Real Life Terrible Results

Only last month did I start getting links to any of the sites. I am averaging about $1 a day from all twenty-five sites together. That’s about $25 a month total, far less than break even cost. I just checked today and have made $50.55 for this current month, month four for most sites. That's about one twenty-fifth of what I need to break even for the sites. Half the money came from the twenty AdSense sites, with the rest from the other five sites. There are still two more days left in this month.

I believe the results will continue to improve as long as I add articles and get links to the sites. It is a long way to go until the sites break even, if they ever do, so I am not holding my breath. Although these results are terrible, in my opinion, it must be mentioned that I am doing this part-time and only recently has there been an effort to get links to the sites. If it had been a full-time effort (and it could easily have been) then the results would seem even worse. I have totally ignored the effort (which has been considerable) in getting the sites up and working properly, correcting and adding the articles and revising the links for each new article I added to the site.

I do have software that would easily generate such sites, but decided not to use it due to leaving footprints and having the sites considered spam sites by Google or the other two top search engines. From the looks of it right now it's too early to make an accurate judgment as to whether the sites will be worthwhile. I tend to think the effort is too great the way my sites are set up now and the cost of the articles too high to make a decent long term profit. I figure I need to revise how the articles are added and probably get the cost of the articles down a lot more, to less than half what I am paying now to have a fair chance to break even, let along make a profit.

Is AdSense Worthwhile for Beginners?

So the question, can beginners make money with AdSense sites cannot be answered yet with any accuracy from my results so far. On the surface it appears the answer is no, not if following my route. Only if extraordinary amounts of traffic can be obtained does it look like my sites will make any decent money from AdSense. Probably another, a better approach, will be necessary and a lot more pages with AdSense ads on it will be required to be able to make any significant money. I suspect I will need at least 50 to 100, or more, articles per site to have a fair chance of creating a small part-time equivalent income from the sites.

If you consider an average cost of six dollars for an article, and that is a very low cost for a new article, and still the same five articles a month, with just half the estimated ten dollars monthly miscellaneous costs being only five dollars, the thirty-five dollar monthly cost per site still is difficult to conceive making even that much from the poor results experienced so far. Only time will tell whether the effort will be worthwhile.

I am already changing my html sites so they will be easier and faster to add the new articles. Unfortunately that may cause me to effectively start over with my AdSense earnings since the links will be different and any pages already indexed will have to be re-indexed again since I am changing the sites little by little to php sites. I did something similar several months ago to a single larger site and even months later over 500 of those original pages were still indexed even though they had been off the site for many months.

If you agree it's difficult for a beginner to make money with AdSense or if you have made a worthwhile AdSense profit in a short time period please enter your opinion on www.cackel.com if you would like to share your success or failure. I would like to see other views on this topic, especially those who have made a decent return on non-directory type AdSense sites within a reasonably short period of time.

Beginner’s Guide To Free For All Sites (FFA's)

2008-09-26T07:53:00.004-07:00

For those of you who don't know what an FFA site is, it's basically a website where you can post a link/add to your website for free. Generally it is also posted to many other sites at the same time and hopefully somebody sees your link...free advertising in other words. This also creates backlinks to your website. When you post a link, you are also giving permission (whether you know it or not) to receive confirmation e-mails back from the site owner.

What seems to happen though is many people see this as free advertising and get angry when, not only do they not see a flood of sales come pouring in, but they start receiving other people's offers. I know when the first time it happened to me, I couldn't figure out what was going on and was frustrated at the results.

Let's back up a moment and look at the bigger picture of what an FFA site is and its TRUE purpose. The true purpose of an FFA site is for the owner of that site to promote his/her business. It's really not just because he's a nice guy giving people a free advertising place.

(If it were such a goldmine for pulling in sales, he would be doing it himself). That is just the bait, getting people to his site to post their links, thinking they are getting free advertising, so he can respond with "confirmation" of your link, and his business ad.

Those confirmation e-mails are NOT spam. You had to agree to receive them in order to post your link. Who are reading these ads anyway? So is posting to FFA's a total waste of time? Not necessarily, you do get an occasional sale, people do go back to post their links and sometimes take a quick look through the links to see what's there while they're at it.

So what's the answer? Get your own FFA site to promote your business. There are many excellent resources out there. I have found from personal experience however,that many of the services offering FFA's sites, offer a free version or a paid upgrade. The phrase "You get what you pay for" comes to mind with these. I've used several kinds and found that the paid upgrades more than paid for themselves in sales. Shop around however to compare between companies.

You can promote any product through this method; information products, crafts, vitamins, whatever. You could have the very best on the entire internet, but if nobody sees your offer, it's not going to get the sales you desire. It takes traffic to get sales. These sites are options for driving those numbers to your site. Free classified ads sites are also in this same category with the same purpose and can be worth pursuing.

Ways for a Kid to Make Money

2008-09-26T07:51:00.001-07:00

One of the ways for a kid to make money. Can a kid make money by writing essays? Yes!

After 2 years perhaps more than many adults are earning.

Teen Handicaps

no experience of life
no money
need time for homework, sport and friends.

Teen Advantages

It's not true that you've no experience. You've a lot of school experience.
You have a lot more energy to bring to the task than many adults have.
You can get help. Your English teacher will be delighted to help you with writing essays.
Parents can pay for ways for a kid to make money. Get their promise to get you started if you get top marks for ten essays. You'll soon write top essays with my free report.
Time for 2 essays/week

No Salesmanship

Your ways for a kid to make money must not need salesmanship. As a salesperson

you wouldn't be looking for ideas - you'd already be making money.

You really can do it

How do I know? A teenage girl is making

money with this idea just writing essays about her holidays. One of the ways for a kid to make money is here

http://case-studies.sitesell.com/buildwebprofit.html#NORI

Notice that her income is still growing. She didn't get rich immediately.

You don't need to know anything about making a web site. The package that Nori uses does all the technical stuff for you. So there's no excuse... you concentrate on ways for a kid to make money with essays.

Tier 1 of ways for a kid to make money

Find a demand. Choose a subject that interests you with lots of popular keywords (search terms). Free search here http://searchit.sitesell.com/buildwebprofit.html
Check Overture for top bids on the most popular keywords. Best if there are lots of keywords with bids over $5
Search Google. If there are 30 million sites competing for a keyword you aren't quite ready to compete.
There is a better search tool that does steps 1 and 3 for you but it's not free.
The package that Nori uses, has a search engine built in.

Just one word of warning. If you're using Overture keyword tools and suddenly get a message saying that you're over using it - you've lost the use of a tool. Other keyword tools keep changing their IP number so Overture doesn't recognise them on their next visit.

There isn't room here to cover all the ways that I use to discover what people want to read about.

In all ways for a kid to make money the important idea is... avoid selling. You need to sell if there is no interest. If people are interested they'll swarm around you.

You want people who are interested and have money.

That's why you check on the top bids. Forget a subject with 5 cent bids. Don't stop until you find a good subject. An unpopular subject will lose you money.

Ways for a kid to make money?

You are ready when

hordes visit your site
you've written about 30 popular web pages.

Submit your site to Google Adsense. Once they accept you they'll give you a code to put on your web pages.

Each time someone clicks on an Adsense advert on your page with a $5 bid, Google gets a share and you get a share. Do you see why I don't suggest bothering with 5cent bids? You're getting money without selling anything at all.

Tier 2 of Ways for a Kid to Make Money

Now continue writing more web pages, but also write free articles like this one.

Why...? What's the point...?

See the links at the foot of this article for free goodies? When your article excites anybody they visit your website. Thousands of visitors means thousands of people seeing your Adsense ads, which means...more money.
You will build your reputation. Reputation is valuable for your future.
Archive your articles on cheap website offering a sub-domain
Modify and reuse on your web pages.

Employment

One day you may want a job if you haven't chosen a subject that thrills visitors.

Reputation: your potential employer may have read some of your articles. Otherwise suggest a Google search on a unique phrase in one of your articles. If she sees that 1256 websites have copied your article will she be impressed?

Money: you can afford to wait for a better job if you're getting money from your website.

Experience: how many of your rivals have experience handling money, keeping accounts, filling in tax forms, making a website? Very few I think!

Website Positioning and Search Engine Ranking. Tutorial 1: Website Submission

2008-09-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of tutorials designed to assit you improve your website positioning and search engine ranking in top search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. In this tutorial we will be looking at website submission which includes the correct way to perform manual website submission, website submission to targeted catagories, reciprocal linking and avoiding website submission mistakes which could harm your website position in search engine ranking.

Website submission is, at its name implies, submission of your website to search engines and directories in order for your website to be easily found by targeted internet users. You can use various techniques to submit your website to search engines which will assist in you achieving high search engine ranking in top search engines. We will concentrate on three positive website submission methods: Manual website submission, Automanted website submission and One way linking to targeted websites and search engines.

Manual Website Submission.

Manual website submission consists of you contacting search engines and directories, directly and including your website URL into the human editors or robots crawl bank. Manual website submission is generally the only form of website submission acceptable to top search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN for you to be included in their search engines. Directories such as DMOZ and Zeal also rely on manual website submission in order for their editors to view and possibly list your website in their pages.

Each search engine and directory has their own specifications for manual website submission. MSN and Yahoo require you only to input your website URL, while Google asks you also to include some keywords relevant to your website (we will look at keywords directly in tutorial 3).

Directory submission is a little different to search engine submission in that a number of concise details are needed in order for successful inclusion into their pages. DMOZ requires a brief description of your website when submitting and Zeal asks for both content and keywords when applying a manual submission. When submitting your website into directories, it is vital that you chose a catagory relevant to your website's content in order to even be considered for inclusion. It is best to research the directory subjects until you find the absolute perfect catagory for your website. For example, if your website offers a specific service in a specific region, let us say a florist in South London, find a catagory which details your service and location such as : "Regional: Europe: United Kingdom: Business and Economy: Agriculture and Forestry: Horticulture: Flowers and Floristry" rather than "Shopping: Flowers: Florist". Once you have found your targeted catagory you now need to submit your website for the human editors to review. When submitting your website description, be very specific of your content and keep in mind the catagory you are submitting to. Using our example site, a good description would be "London florist stocking flowers for all occassions. Floral gift baskets and arrangments for weddings, anniversaries and special holidays." Do not fall into the trap of using the description to list all keywords, just focus on one or two targeted keywords and do not be repetative. Your manual website submission description needs to be in full and flowing sentences rather than a list of terms. DMOZ is harsh and long in its website inclusion process after manual website submission. They offer no feedback and you can expect to wait from months to years to see your website listed in their directory. Also, if your domain has been owned previously and has been black listed by DMOZ prior to you owning your website domain, do not expect to see your website in there after you have manually submitted your website to them.

It is not a good idea to spam search engines with multiple manual website submissions. If you have searched for your website domain name after website submission and have not seen your website listed with a detailed description of your website after a period of three months, you may submit your website again to DMOZ, Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you see that your website has not been included into top search engines or directories such as Google, Yahoo, DMOZ and MSN after three attempted website submissions (3 attempts in 9 months), you might want to email the search engine representative or editor directly and ask if your website is in the robot crawl bank and why it has not been included into their search engine.

Remember, always submit your homepage to the search engines first. Also make sure you have links to your internal web pages on your home page. Robots will then crawl and list your whole site in search catagories relevant to each page. Once your homepage has been listed, then attempt to manually submit your inside pages.

Automated Website Submission.

Automated website submission has gotten a bad name lately, due mainly to spamming websites into inappropraite submission catagories. Automated website submission consists of the website owner using a program to mass submit their websites to a vast number of search engines, listings and directories. Despite the negative press, automated submission is not a bad idea to get your website listed and build search engine listings and website positioning.

If you decide to use an automated website submission program be sure to remember to look through the list of search engines it submits your website to and click off, or mark as submitted, to top search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN as these search engines will look negatively on your website if you attempt to submit your website to them by such means. Try not to submit your website to Free For All links or obvious doorway page links as these are being targeted by top search engines for elimination in organic search results.

Choose targeted search engines relevant to your website content when using automated website submission and remember to resubmit your website on a regular basis (once a month).

One Way Website Linking.

This is a vital component in achieving high website positioning and search engine ranking and is a very easy thing to do. Find websites with similar content or services to yours and ask them to include a link to your website on their site. Make sure you submit your link to sites which are keyword rich and targeted to your website. You should also try and get your link included on a website which has a Google Page Rank of 4/10 or above. Before submitting a link, be sure to look at the source code on the website's page you are submitting to. If the website has their Robots text off, or with a No Crawl instruction, do not waste your time in submitting to them as your website link will not be crawled by search engine robots. You might also want to consider offering reciprocal links on your website which will help you and your linkers build page rank and website positioning in search engine ranking.

To conclude, website submission is vital for your websites success in search engines. You can not rely on your website being listed if you do not submit your website. By implementing the suggestions listed in this tutorial, you should see a good increase in your website positioning in search engine ranking. Remember, it takes time and work to achieve high search engine ranking in some of the top websites, so be patient.

Our next tutorial will focus on Search Engine Optimization.

15 Tips to Bring More Traffic to Your Blog

2008-09-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

There are many factors that make blogs much better than normal WebPages including the speed at which blogs are indexed, ability to submit to blog directories & normal directories, pings and track backs. All these little things can help drive more traffic to blogs. Here are 15 popular techniques you can use:

1. Create at least four keyword posts per day. Most of the top blogs such as Boing Boing, Daily Kos, and Instapundit (with literally tens of thousands of visitors per day) publish an average of 30 small 100-150 word posts per day according to "Secrets of the A-list Bloggers: Lots of Short Posts" by TNL.net

2. Submit to My Yahoo! When you submit your own RSS to My Yahoo it is indexed by Yahoo.

3. Submit to Google's Reader. When you submit your own blog RSS to Google's Reader the Google Blog Search will index your site.

4. Add a relevant link directory to your blog and trade links like a demon possessed! Although it may take more time than simply submitting to a search engine one time, this method is perhaps the best way to drive traffic to your site. Use software such as Zeus to speed up the link trading process.

5. Use ping sites like ping-o-matic. Ping your site every time you add a new post.

6. Submit your blog to traditional search engines such as AltaVista, and MSN.

7. Submit your blog to traditional directories such as DMOZ. Directories (particularly DMOZ) increase relevance with Google. DMOZ is very picky, but what do you have to lose by trying?

8. Submit to as many RSS Directories and Search Engines as possible. This is a simple but repetitive process that can be done with software such as RSS SUBMIT.

9. Comment on other blogs. Do not just leave short, lazy comments like "I agree." Leave well thought out replies that will force readers to wonder "who wrote this?"

10. Use track backs. If there is a blog that you refer to or quote and it is highly relevant to your subject, leave a track back. It increases your link popularity and may even score a few interested readers from the linked site.

11. Go offline. Use newspaper ads, public bulletin boards, business cards, even stickers to let as many people as possible know your blog exists.

12. Add a link to your blog in your e-mail signature block.

13. Use Groups (Usenet). Find a relevant group on Google groups, Yahoo groups, MSN groups or any of the thousands of other FREE group services and find like minded people and talk with them. Make sure to use your blog URL like it is your name.

14. Use Forums. Forums are one of the best places to go for advice. Go to forums and find problems to solve. Make sure you leave your blog name, but be tactful about it; some forums get annoyed with those who selfishly drop a few links to their own site and leave.

15. Tag your website. Tagging is a new idea that has erupted across the web. Sites like Del.icio.us, Technorati and many others have a social feature that allows you to place your article under keywords or "tags" that everyone interested in that tag can see.

What's New At Google Labs?

2008-09-24T06:03:00.001-07:00

The world's most popular search engine just keeps chugging along - the little train that could (and did) make billions of dollars and dominate the Internet landscape.

Like a giant tree with a root system extending deep into the earth, Google seeks to expand and diversify far beyond mere online search.

In their quest, the little elves at Google never seem to sleep and toil endlessly to bring us new gadgets and gizmos intended to make our lives better, both online and offline.

These four latest free offerings from Google's Labshttp://Labs.Google.com - will help you do everything from organize your thoughts to find the local pizza restaurant's phone number through your cell phone.

** Google Code Search **http://www.google.com/codesearch

This one should have the geeks salivating like Pavlov's dog sniffing out a rump roast!

This new search tool at Google allows you to search for public source code, the lines and lines of code that make your nifty software programs actually function.

Instead of writing all the code themselves, programmers can find and grab huge chunks of code free for the taking.

This makes a great staring point not only for programmers who want a leg up on finishing projects, but also neat for would-be software entrepreneurs who want to surf for ideas.

** Google Voice Local Search ** http://labs.google.com/goog411/

Ok, I'll admit to some skepticism when I saw that Google would help me find the number for the local barbershop just by talking into my phone.

But Google actually surprised me when I dialed 1-800-GOOG-411.

The phone asked me to say the city and state I wanted to search, and then asked me if I wanted to search by business name or business category.

Once I found the business I wanted, Google went ahead and dialed the number for me.

I found the service no worse than the automated search from the phone company, and Google offers this service FREE.

Well worth a call if you find yourself paying some hefty 411 fees to the phone company or your wireless provider.

** Google Reader ** http://reader.google.com/

The jury is still debating whether my dear sweet mother will ever subscribe to an RSS feed (the syndication feeds from blogs, news services, and more), so I'm not sure how universal RSS will ever get.

However, Google doess offer a free RSS reader online that enables you to easily subscribe to blogs, news feeds, and any other RSS feeds you like.

The readers lets you organize your feeds, update, and view them all in one place.

Not as powerful as some readers you pay for, but very functional and hey, you can't beat free!

** Google Notebook ** http://www.google.com/notebook/

Google Noetbook is the most recent graduate of the Google Labs.

This handy program allows you to organize your notes and clippings as you travel the web.

Instead of just bookmarking a site in your favorites and trying to remember why you liked it, with Google Notebook, you can highlight what you want and click the "clip" button.

You can then organize your notes however you want and then search through your note text at any time.

You can even share your notes with others.

Google Notebook is available through your web browser after you download and install special extensions to help you clip items you find on the Web.

Finding Profitable Keywords For Your Google Adsense Campaign

2008-09-24T06:01:00.000-07:00

No doubt that Google Adsense has become the number one player in making money on the internet. The latest claim that I saw advertised was an internet marketer that made over $19,000 in one month. What is their secret? It is simply writing articles and building adsense webpages that use high traffic, or even some traffic, that use profitable keywords. Not just any keywords, profitable keywords. You have to find keywords that your customers use and that your competitors do not use. Their are many tools available and this article will cover just a few of them.

WordTracker is the leading keyword research tool. SEO professionals worldwide use this tool to find profitable keywords. Wordtracker's suggestions are based on over 300 million keywords and phrases that people have used over the previous 90 days. (In other words, there is no "guessing" when you use Wordtracker. Everything is based on the keywords millions of people have actually typed into search engines.)

KeywordDiscovery is also a very popular keyword research tool and is a major competitor to Wordtracker. KeywordDiscovery compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide, to create what they call "the most powerful keyword research tool". It has been noted in a number of reviews that Keyword Discovery returns more words that are relevant than Wordtracker, Yahoo's or Google's suggestion tools.

There are many other tools on the internet that are worth mentioning. They can be used to supplement and verify the profitable keywords that you find using the major keyword tools. They include, the Google search tool, Yahoo Overture, SEO20/20, webconfs website keyword suggestions (you put your competitor's website URL in this one to determine the profitable keywords they are using), and many more.

The SEO20/20 search tool is the most valuable for determining monthly traffic for profitable keywords by search engine. It includes information on the Overture bid prices, total monthly search volume, estimated search volume for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Digital Point (WordTracker), and Nichebot, Google trends, Google Traffic Estimator, Google Suggest, Google Sysnonyms, and Adwords Keyword Tool. It also provides you with links to news searches, directories, blog searches, tag searches, thesaurus, dictionary

Secrets To Finding Work With Google

2008-09-23T23:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a secret technique for finding a job in the film industry that has had amazing results! It will give you an advantage over everyone else looking for work. Trust me on this one as I have personally used it to find work, locate producers and get deals. It's the bomb! Here's how it works.

First, go to Google and set up a "Google Alert". This feature sends you an email every time something happens in the news.

Now, it will ask you to enter keywords for the search. Enter something that relates to the type of work you are looking for such as: "casting director", "new production company", "in production" and so forth.

Save this alert. Now every time a new production company is formed or a film goes into production you will get an alert sent directly to you! From there do a little research and gather the contact's name and address. If it is not included in the alert you can go to www.imdb.com. It has an entire database of industry information or you can just do a standard search through your ISP.

Once you get the contact info send your resume or headshot right away. Simple as one, two, three! Right? The great thing about this is that you will be one of the first to receive this information and ahead of the game. So your resume will be among the first ones that they see.

But what I really like about Google Alerts is that you can set up more than just one and enter as many keywords as you like.

I recommend that you keep them specific as possible.

I am sure that if done correctly this technique can help you not just get a job but make serious contacts as well! Friend, try it and see for yourself. And if you should need any help please feel free to email me. Have fun!

How To Get Indexed In Google Search Fast Without Submitting To Google

2008-09-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

Most new websites think that the only way to get indexed into Google search or any search engine is to submit there website.

Once a webmaster goes and submits there website into search engines their site normally will be placed on hold. Google calls this the Sand Box affect. This can take months before your website shows in search index.

Do you have months to wait and see if your website shows in Search Engines?

If your answer is no than I have a 4 step easy process that will get your website into Google Search index in some times less than a week and you never submit it to Google.

Read on to find out how.

1) The first thing you want to do is forget about submitting your site directly to the big engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo. This is the old, slow way.

2) Now the next thing you want to do is look online for free online directories and websites to submit your site to. Just type Free Search Engine Friendly Directory List into your favorite search engine. This should give you a good number of websites to start with.

3) Once you have found a list of free directories you can start submitting or suggesting your website. Be sure to place your website into the proper related categories. Try to look for directories that have a page rank of at least 2 to 3 to submit to first. They hold a bit more weight with Google Search than a 0 to 1 page rank sites.

4) Be sure to use a text link with your keyword phrases when submitting rather than just your URL. This will help search engines determine what keywords to index your website under.

That’s it. It is that simple. Google Search and other search engines will find your website link while crawling websites and directories already indexed. Search engines look at this a vote for your site. Because most directories are human edited and if your link has been approved, engines like Google Search realize that your website must have some value.

Note: Not all directories will approve your site submission so you want to continue to find new link possibilities as this is also an excellent way to build link popularity.

Search Engines are always looking to supply new, fresh valued content websites to their update index, increasing the quality of their query results.

There are other things you can do to create links to your website like forum marketing, article submission and press releases but submitting your website to directories works just as well and free directories are all over the net.

Gerrymandering The Google Search Results

2008-09-23T23:43:00.001-07:00

Every few months, you will see posts by many people declaring that Google has it in for their website. Often, you see threats about how the webmaster plans to sue Google for hurting their business' profits. On and on it goes... Every webmaster who was dropped from Google's top search result pages wants to believe that Google singled out their website and their business for punishment and extinction.

How The Google Search Results Is Related To Gerrymandering

According to Wikipedia.com, "Gerrymandering is a form of redistricting in which electoral district or constituency boundaries are manipulated for an electoral advantage."

Most states in the US redraw their electoral districts at least every decade. In 36 of the states, the state legislature is responsible for drawing the new districts -- in principle to account for shifts in population -- and the governor is required to approve those changes.

With nearly every redistricting, the party who is out-of-power generally screams foul. The argument is always that the political party in power adjusted the lines to improve their ability to win elections and control the electoral power structure.

The entire process of redistricting is a good analogy for the Google algorithm changes. The people in power (Google) redraw the lines, and the party out-of-power (the webmasters who dropped in ranking) cry foul, threatening lawsuits and other actions.

Something Right And Something Wrong

Of course, the same webmasters screaming about having dropped in Google's search results did not have a problem when Google allowed them to climb in the search results previously.

People only moan about things when they are on the way down. When they were on the way up, they danced on the coffins of their competitors without a care in the world.

The truly funny thing about it is that when people were on their way up in the Google search results, they told all of their friends that "they" did something right. When they are on their way down, "Google" did something wrong.

Shaky Foundations For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

PROBLEM: If the website dropped out of Google's top 1000 results, then I am willing to bet that in nearly every situation of this type, the webmaster had done something wrong in the last few years, and Google has just now caught on to this infraction.

For example, in years past, link farms were utilized by webmasters and accepted by Google. Then Google began to consider link farms to be "bad neighborhoods."

Link farms are the kind of thing that can be easily recognized by human and search engine alike. So, the link farms were tagged as "bad neighborhoods" and their values were discounted to zero, and the websites linked from link farms got a minus points for their participation in the link farms.

It was a bad practice that the webmaster had participated, and Google finally got around to penalizing the websites whose rankings were supported by these shaky foundations.

SOLUTION: If you try to put yourself into the shoes of the experts at Google, and you wanted to improve the Google search results, what would YOU do? Before you answer this question, remember that you work for Google and not for yourself. What would you do? What would you do different?

"White hat" and "black hat" SEO methods are an analogy of Search Engine Optimization techniques that refers back to the old cowboy classics, where the "good guy" always wore a "white hat" and the 'bad guy" always wore a "black hat".

While you are working for Google, take a look at the SEO technique you are thinking about using for your own website. Chances are that if you deem a SEO technique to be "gray hat" (something in between ethical SEO and unethical SEO), then chances are that someday that technique will be deemed "black hat" by the Google engineers. And if the SEO technique is "black hat," it will likely be targeted for discount by Google at some time in the future.

If you delve into "gray hat" or "black hat" SEO, you may be able to rocket to the top of the Google search results quickly, but you will not be able to hold that position for long. Google will eventually get wise to your gimmick.

If you can "white hat" your website to the top of the search results, your future ranking will likely hold its ground for many years to come.

Your Competition Out-Played You

PROBLEM: If a website dropped a few positions in the Google search results, I am willing to bet that in nearly every situation, one of the website's major competitors out-performed them in the search results.

There are certain things that you can do correctly, to elevate your own listings in the search engine results. Because you have the capability to do these things, your competitors also have the capability to do these things.

Well guess what? Your competitor did what you should have done. They set up marketing systems to ensure that they could climb in the search results, and they climbed enough to pass you by.

SOLUTION: Do those things that you know you should be doing. And more importantly, do them consistently. Your competitor wants your placement in the search results, and they are going to do what it takes for them to get there.

So, it is imperative for you to keep moving forward in the process of building your ranking in the search engines. When you stand still, resting in the comfort zone of where you reside today, then you are bound to be overtaken by someone who wants to be where you are, a little bit more than you do.

Stir That Pot

PROBLEM: If a website dropped a few pages in the search results, the cause for the drop may have been caused by a combination of the two above-mentioned problems: shaky SEO foundations, and hungry competitors.

SOLUTION: Keep your eye on the big picture. You know what you have done to strengthen your website in the past. Keep learning and keep growing.

If you find that something you had done in the past may affect your website negatively in the future, implement "white hat" SEO techniques to strengthen your position, and make plans to eliminate your reliance on "black hat" SEO systems before Google does it for you.

Don't Make The Mess And You Won't Have To Clean It Up

Some may think my approach to housecleaning is an indication of laziness. I consider it to be an indication of good time management. I prefer to reserve my time for things that are more enjoyable.

My theory towards housework -- and I try to teach this to my kids often -- is that if you don't want to clean up the mess, don't make the mess in the first place. If the house is not messy, you don't have to clean it. So, don't make the house messy.

I utilize the same approach to my websites. If I do it "white hat" and above-reproach the first time, then I won't have to go in and fix my rankings everytime Google changes their algorithms.

Stop Standing Still

Do remember that for most every search term you compete to rank for, there are probably another one million web pages competing to rank for the same keyword phrase. Getting to the top of the search engine results is a process, not a destination. You must keep competing to maintain your spot at the top of the search results.

If you want to get to the top of the search results, you will have to take positive steps to get there. And, if you want to maintain your top position in the search engines, you need to keep doing the things that put you in that top spot in the first place.

Google Adsense And ClickBank Pay Per Click Ads

2008-09-23T23:42:00.001-07:00

One of the biggest trends over the last few years has been the explosion of websites built to take advantage of the Google AdSense system.

And when someone clicks on the AdSense ads that you display, a few cents tumble into your account. If you have sites earning money with AdSense you'll know why it is such a good idea.

Then there’s ClickBank. The hottest and most well known affiliate programs network. ClickBank is one of the major players in affiliate marketing online and show every sign of growing in popularity, strength and power in the market.

Clickbank has been around for years and has earned an excellent reputation online. They work as a payment processor and an affiliate program all rolled into one.

Now the most obvious fact with Google AdSense is that you have no idea how much you will get paid for each ad clicked. And while you can get occasional clicks worth a dollar or more, most bring you only a few cents. A more detailed version of this subject can be obtained by going herehttp://www.worldwidewebinformationcentral.com

Now if you find that the promise of making hundreds of dollars a day from displaying pay-per-click ads on your website is falling short of expectations, why not try an alternate method, that could double, triple, or even quadruple your website revenue ?

So, why settle for this handful of cents for each click that turned into a referral for someone else, when those same clicks can be potential sales for a product that would pay YOU 50, 60 or even 75% in commission?

To explain this in detail - if one of your visitors clicks on an ad on your site and ends up buying a $47 eBook, imagine how much better it will feel to get a commission of up to $30 rather than the few cents that you'd normally get for your efforts.

Besides, Clickbank marketplace includes over 10,000 eBooks and other downloadable products on all kinds of subjects, that anyone with a free ClickBank® account can sell or promote to make substantial commissions of up to 75% .

Clickbank also has a built in affiliate program and they provide you with sales and commissions reports and will send you pay cheques twice per month. But unfortunately, what Clickbank does not have, is a "user interface" department.

This is where CBengine comes in.

CBengine is one of the most powerful ways to monetize your website. It is a system that works similar to Google AdSense but displays products from Clickbank with your affiliate ID already embedded in the ads ? It is specifically designed to help you bring your site's revenue potential to it's max, a set and forget service designed to bring the best of ClickBank's high commission paying, downloadable products (and services) right into your content.

In short you can turn your website into a monster Clickbank affiliate money.

So, why try and make your fortune only from the PPC ( pay per click ) revolution where you normally tend to make much more than a few cents a day or perhaps a couple of dollars at best.

Is it not wise option to atleast try out CBengine content-relevant product matching system.

How would you like to have a smart engine that works similar to Google AdSense but display products from Clickbank with your affiliate ID already embedded in the ads ? What if you can easily turn your website into a monster Clickbank affiliate money.

Besides, affiliate marketing is booming and CBengine puts your website right in front of the hungry crowd.

CBengine as mentioned earlier is similar in the way it works compared to other contextual ad delivery systems ( like the ones used by the major search engines ), but with one major difference

Top 12 Tips To Writing Effective Google AdWords Ads

2008-09-23T23:39:00.002-07:00

Top 12 Tips To Writing Effective Google AdWords Ads

Last Update: Friday, December 01, 2006.

In this article I show you my top twelve tips for creating effective Google AdWords ads.

I've been testing the Google pay per click advertising system for a while, with much success. These tips will help you create ads that generate higher click through rates, and lower cost per click.

1. Target The Right Audience

Target the right audience by selecting the language and countries that you want to target. For example, I exclude all countries where English is not understood by a large percentage of the population.

2. Refine Your Keywords

Use square brackets "[...]" around your keyword/s.

For example:

[google]
[google adwords]

Your ad will only show when the search is for the exact keyword phrase you have included within the brackets.

The ad will not show for searches that include other keywords. In our example, this would be for searches such as "google search," or "google news."

3. Test Multiple Ads Simultaneously

Always test 2 (or more) ads simultaneously. This is what is known in the print industry as an A/B split test.

Find out which one produces the higher click through ratio. Then replace the weaker performing ad with a new one.

Continue this process in your never-ending quest to get the highest click through ratio possible.

4. Track The Return-On-Investment Of Each Ad

Google tracks the click through ratio of each ad. But it doesn't track the conversion ratio.

Use a special tracking link in each ad to track its conversion ratio. For example, you could attach each ad with an affiliate tracking system link. Make sure each ad produces a return-on-investment.

5. Include Targeted Keywords In Your Ad

Include the targeted keywords in the headline and the description of the ad. Google will highlight searched keywords in bold in the ad.

When people scan search results, they look for the keywords they have entered. Searched keywords highlighted in bold certainly help to catch the user's attention. For this reason, ads with searched keywords usually perform better than ones without.

6. Sell The Benefits

Spell out one or more major benefit in your ad. For example, make more money, stay younger looking, lose weight, get healthier, live happier, etc.

7. Include Attention Grabbing Words In Your Ad

Start your headline with an attention grabbing word. For example, "Free:, New:, Sale:, etc." Make sure you stay within Google's editorial guidelines.

8. Use Words That Provoke Emotion & Enthusiasm

Use power words or call-to-action phrases that provoke emotion, enthusiasm and a response.

Here are some examples of power words:

free, cheap, sale, special offer, time limited offer, tricks, you, tips, enhance, discover, fact, learn, at last, free shipping, etc.

Here are some examples of call-to-action phrases:

* Buy Today - Save 50%
* Download Free Trial Now
* Sale Ends Tomorrow

Make sure the phrase specific to your business, otherwise Google may reject the phrase.

9. Sell Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

What makes your product or service better, or different, from the competition? Spell them out in your ad.

For example, one of Amazon.com's first taglines was "Earth's Biggest Bookstore." That's a powerful USP!

10. Link To Relevant Landing Pages

If an ad is for a specific product or service, create a landing page for the ad. Include relevant and useful information to convert the customer. Generally, a well designed landing page will almost always convert more visitors than if you simply sent the visitor to the home page.

11. Remove Common Words

Remove common words, such as "a, an, in, on, it, of, etc." Remove every word that does not absolutely need to be in the ad. Make every word count.

12. Deter Freebie Hunters

Deter freebie hunters by including the price of the product or service at the end of the ad. This will improve your overall conversion ratio and lower your average customer acquisition cost.

This may reduce your click through ratio, but that's OK. After all, you're not trying to target every body, only potential customers. In most cases, freebie hunters will never become paying customers.

Conclusion

Remember that advertising is a never-ending series of tests. Always track your ads. Never stop testing different keywords and ads to improve your conversion ratio and lower your customer acquisition cost.

Advertising in the Google AdWords advertising system works. It may not necessarily produce as many visitors as Overture, but the click through cost is usually lower.

Master the art of advertising in Google, and you could outsmart the competitor who's always outbidding you in Overture. ;o)
Internet marketing expert.About The Author: Michael Wong is the editor of GoDefy.com - the world's first online marketing comparison shopping search engine and Mike's Marketing Tools. Michael is also the author of the leading Search Engine Optimization Guide and numerous marketing tips.
Publishing Rights: You may republish this article in your web site, newsletter, or ebook, on the condition that you agree to leave the article, author's signature and photograph, and all links completely intact. Full instructions on how to copy and upload my photo to your server.

http://www.onlinemarketingbusinessopportunity.net/

I Got To No. 1 on Google At No Cost

2008-09-23T23:39:00.001-07:00

After many years of buying into everything in sight I finally got the message.

For years I have been told, get a list, well I tried and failed miserably. Seemed I got a few and as fast as I got them they disappeared. Many of you know what I mean.

Then someone did me a favor I was told to write articles and get sites linking to mine. I didn’t think much of that idea as I thought I had no talent for writing.

However after 3 years or so with no results I was desperate.

Well, 10 weeks ago I decided I would give it a go.

Didn't think I could do it, but I wrote one article about Toxins, then I wrote another and another, to date I have 20. Even though I say it myself, they are not too bad.

I next sent the Articles to 150 directories manually. I know there is software out there that works great, unfortunately it never worked for me.

Anyway, as can imagine it was a lot of work. I kept at it, and I found most of the directories linked back to my site and I began to get hits.

By the way I did this without spending one red cent. I had made a decision that no money would be spent for anything. During the years I had spent enough. I wanted to prove it could be done without spending.

I guess I could have put this together as an ebook and charged the usual $47.00 for it, that seems to be the regular number. I decided against that, as I had made a vow I would not spend any more money, and I didn’t want others to spend.

It is quite an achievement to get to No 1 on Google and spending nothing. Oh, that’s a lie, I did spend $1.50 on a Article submitter on eBay, unfortunately it didn’t work. That is something I should mention here, these Article submitters are available for $47.00 (there’s that number again) all over the internet, however you can get them for $1.50 on eBay. The guy told me the one I bought from him worked on his computer, so it could be a good deal.

You really need a submitter for it is a lot of work, believe me.

After you have sent all your articles to the directories, you receive links back to your site, as you well know linking is one of the most important factors to get your site listed high on the search engines.

The 100 or so links coming back to my site from the articles were not enough to do the full job, so I had to come up with a software to do the job for me. Free of course….

I found http://www.linkshighway.net/main/ This did a great job for me, easy to use, it got 70 extra links in the matter of a couple of hours. Really it is easy as pie. I get more than that, I had 14 requests to link to me, yesterday so it continually builds.

Then I saw somewhere, the more links to your site the better, these guys were talking in thousands. Iv’e still some work to do.

As I said, about 4 weeks ago I started to get hits to my site and I have kept records of them, as I wanted to see how they grew.

Once again it was easy going, simple. I now had 20 articles out there to 150 directories and had 200 sites linking back to my site. Now the next thing was to have a web site that was friendly to the search engines.

I will continue with this posting in a couple of days as I have something that really is pressing.

Before I leave I have to show you this, here are the results of the last few keywords that are truly working, I will give you the reason in a couple days why they work.

ISAGENIX home business... 4th out of 366,000
Hong Kong 3rd out of 24,600
are you sure it works 1st out of 42,800
Natural Cleanse 1st out of 86,500
facts 2nd out of 29,200
join our team 1st out of 43,900
liver cleanse 3rd out of 15,900
Leader 3rd out of 38,700
proof 1st out of 16,900
cleanse 6th out of 104,000
Colon Cleanse 5th out of 37,900
Natural colon cleanse 4th out of 22,600
Work at home 4th out of 218,000
Isagenix 29th out of 695,000
How to use the 9 day plan 2nd out of 37,000

Removed From Google Index, Why ?

2008-09-23T23:37:00.002-07:00

1. Google Statement

"Your page was manually removed from our index, because it did not conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. If you think your site may fall into this category, you might try 'cleaning up' the page and sending a re-inclusion request to help@google.com. We do not make any guarantees about if or when we will re-include your site."

SO : Firs of all No one other than Google could tell you precisely why your site was removed. And Google doesn't do that sort of thing. The best that can be had is an analysis yielding red flags that could lead to your site's removal.

2. No SEO can guarantee inclusion in Google after he/she analyze the site.

3. The search engines are not terribly specific about the practices that are considered to be SE spam, however, Google offers a short list:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content

Most of "the rest" is covered by:

"Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?""

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

"Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here, (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known web sites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it."

Webmaster Guidelines | Quality

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Yahoo Search is even more restrictive in their definitions of spam and undesirables, however, concentration on detection and removal has not been receiving quite as much focus. It would be an excellent idea to be aware of and conform to Y's restrictions, since Yahoo has no reacceptance policy. Banishment has been, in every case I've heard of, permanent. [http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html]

4. Crosslinking / Interlinking

The latest practice apparently added to the list of undesirables is crosslinking or interlinking. Made for the SE sites are linked together in an attempt to artificially inflate PageRank.

"Cross-linking - If your entire site is sitting at PR0, one possibility is a cross-linking penalty. Sometimes a webmaster who controls two or more websites will place links from every page of one website to every page of the other sites to increase the PageRank ofall the sites. If detected, this will quickly incur a penalty if not an outright ban from the Google index."

Why's My Sites PageRank Now Zero

http://www.rlrouse.com/pagerank-penalty.html

Among other indicators, factors which might prompt discovery of crosslinkage could be:

Same content verbatim
Same cookie structure
Javascript function names
Linked CSS and JS files
CSS class names
Same contact information posted on websites
Common name servers
Same/similar images and/or graphics theme
Site hosted on same IP/block
Whois information matching
Alexa contact information matching
Interlinking of domains
Common backlinks (indirect crosslinking)
Same credit card used for anything
Login from same IP to separate accounts
Residual cookies from past logins
Similar file names or linking/directory structures
Code Comments

It used to be considered relatively safe to have as many inbound links as possible. Regardless of source. Over the course of this year, that assumption has spawned link purchase, and hidden crosslinking. Nowsites must also be very careful about inbound links. The crosslinked and purchased links networks have been devalued. Sites linking to those types of networks have reported decreasing traffic, and finally,over the past month or so, a number of such sites have been completely dropped from the index.

Whether this was a manual removal or an algorithm shift can't be determined without proprietary information from inside Google, which we already know isn't possible. Remember Google's SE spam fighting philosophy: "Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

The crosslinking tactics alone used are consistent with those of other sites that -are- considered spam and may have been reported as such. If Google should target those characteristics based on spam reports for other sites, then it is not surprising that homeboundmortgage would be caught by the same adjustments to the algorithm or filters, and be dropped from the index as well.

5. Over Optimization Penalty

This summer, a new term has emerged, Over Optimization Penalty, which refers to the tweaks most SEO make to pages to "fine tune" them to the top of their keyword categories. Page length, Keyword Density, bold, underline, italic, H1 formulas, link text, and various other small elements are manipulated until the perfect balance is struck, and the SEO'd site contains just a small bit more than the other sites in the top 10. It can be a full time job keeping a site at that level with these small changes. Google has lowered the bar, now effectively saying that high keyword densities, and many of the other SEO tweaks are evidence of too much SEO. Filters are created, and such sites drop in the rankings. Sites that have been playing too close to the edge are penalized.

ALT Text

Keyword in Alt text Not only does this contribute to ideal word count, it may show keyword stuffing in the ALT tags. To clean up, switch to clear text navigation.

Old Link Exchanges

Pages stored in the Internet Archive may indicate the site was once involved in some questionable link exchanges.

Duplicate Content

All duplicate pages should be eliminated. Link just one page consistently.

Now, once all these changes have been made, what to do. You can, of course, try writinghelp@google.com. "We do not make any guarantees about if or when we will re-include your site."

Webmaster Guidelines | Not Listed

www.google.com/webmasters/2.html

I personally know of only 4 sites that have been re-included after manual removal. In each case, the site was crawled regularly, but was not included in the index for over six months. I don't know the specific reason for this, of course, but I would imagine it might be some sort of a testing period. How strong is a webmaster's resolve to walk the straight and narrow, despite lack of indexing.

So, assuming best case, you might be looking at six months or more before your sites are re-included in the index. Once delisted, I also imagine such sites must stay squeaky clean. An SE might forgive once, but seldom twice.

6. Looking Ahead

VERY worst case, permanent exclusion from organic results on Google. Recovery basically means starting over, nearly from scratch. Plan a 12-18 month Overture or AdWords campaign, originally targeting the current website. Pick more specifically targeted keyword phrase initially, to keep costs down. I realize this is a high priced keyword neighborhood. You may need to create new, perfectly targeted landing pages to lower acquisition costs.

Select a new domain name. Without reinclusion within a short period of time, the current name will continue to lose value daily.

Build a new, clean site under the new domain name. Text must be fresh, not a duplicate of the current domain. Do not duplicate site structure, filenames, or other elements that could link it to the banned name.

Gradually add organic links. Expect it to take 6-12 months in order to acquire 1,000 related links. Continue to link to related sites over the next 18 months. Grow the site adding one new page (250-500 words) each day.

As the new site rises in the SERPs gradually switch the PPC traffic to the new site, and retire the current site completely. At any point in the process, if the current (old) site should reappear, it shouldn't be an undue amount of work to gradually retarget the newly acquired links to the older site. Encourage natural link text by those linking to the site.

If you're going to optimize at all, test first in a safely isolated site. You're not going to be able to push the optimization envelope for quite some time. The key to long-term survival and growth will need to be the "content is king" model.

The only bright news in the picture is that the site isn't being meta-hijacked, at least not under any of the keywords I've tried (your homepage META keywords list.) Google itself wouldn't encourage such a practice, and in fact will likely be glad to deal with any such offenders under the DMCA.

Sources:

Crosslink Detection
www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25568.htm

Crosslinking Penalty
www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23890-2-10.htm

Sandbox Effect
www.promodo.com/web-site-promotion-articles-en/about-google-search-engine-promotion-tips_page1_seo60.html

Innocent Interlinking of Sites
www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25564.htm

A Statistical and Experimental Analysis of Google's Florida Update
www.linksecrets.com/pub/florida-report.html

Speculation About August Changes
www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25251.htm

If the sites were dropped due to algorithm changes, then its possible that they'd come back after cleanup. However, their supporting network of links has, at the very least, been devalued. That alone will cause a change in PR, even if cleanup makes them eligible for reinclusion. Site owners report that in these cases, cleaned up sites have come back into the results in 2-3, to six months. Getting back to the top would take additional time, and new, unblemished linking.

Two schools of thought. After clean-up, resubmit the site, or allow it to be found via linkage. Though Google states that there's no oversubmission penalty, most webmasters tend to be leary of such submission, allowing robots to find the site via linkages. I've never had a problem with resubmitting URLs that have dropped out for whatever reason. I take Google at their word that it's harmless, as long as its a manual resubmission for good reason (for example, page down when the crawler came through), not submission through a service or promotion program. One submission is enough. Either way, watch the site logs. If robots don't show up, it could well be a case of manual deletion and permanent ban.

The site needs to be squeaky clean for the near term. The days of easy SEO are on hiatus. The old-fashioned methods (content for users, natural linking) are back. Iconocast has quite a backlog of goodwill links left. Those must be preserved and strengthened, while getting rid of harmful inbound linking.

Again, there's no guarantee or certainty of getting back into the Google index. Same procedures, same wait and see.

Sources:

The August Chronicles
www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25553.htm

Denial of Google Over Optimization Penalty
www.markcarey.com/googleguy-says/archives/discuss-denial-of-google-over-optimization-penalty.html

Future of SEO
http://list.audettemedia.com/SCRIPTS/WA.EXE?A2=ind0408&L=led&D=1&T=0&H=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=266

7. Finally , Should you have questions about the information or links provided, please, feel free to ask on our SEO Forum

Best regards,

Tiberiu Bazavan , ZettWalls Media

Submit Your Site to Google

2008-09-23T23:37:00.001-07:00

As soon as you register your domain name, submit it to Google! Even if you haven't built your site, or thought about your content, submit your domain name to Google. In fact, even if you haven't fully articulated your business plan and marketing plan, submit your domain name to Google.

Don't wait!

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, getting on the search engines has always taken a long time for a new site. Even assuming you do everything right, it takes months before your site is even indexed, and more months before it starts to rank well. As a rule of thumb, never expect to rank highly within 6 months of submitting your site to Google.

The second reason is a recent phenomenon called 'Google Sandbox'. Many SEO experts believe that Google 'sandboxes' new websites. Whenever it detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site).

By submitting your domain name to Google as soon as you register it, you're establishing a site history even if the site has no content. By the time you've built your site and developed your content (and written your business and marketing plans), Google will probably see no need to sandbox you.

If you wait until launch day to submit your site, you'll spend a month or two (maybe more) sitting in the sandbox watching potential customers spend their money elsewhere.

How to submit your site to Google Don't waste money by paying someone else to submit your site to Google. It's easy!

Simply go to http://www.google.com.au/addurl.html, enter your URL (domain name) and a few comments or keywords to describe your site. Then click 'Submit'. That's all there is to it. You only have to do it once, and only for your top level page (i.e. Home page).

Google's robots will then crawl your website the next time they're out and about. Of course, they don't guarantee that you'll be included in their results.

IMPORTANT: As mentioned above, it takes quite a while for your site to appear in the search engines. This is partly because the search engines are big and slow - especially when it comes to new sites. It will take a minimum of 6-8 weeks before your site is indexed.

The Easiest, Most Guaranteed Way, Almost 100% For Signing Up With Google Adsense

2008-09-23T23:36:00.000-07:00

Yeah, as people know, Google Adsense has been a craze everywhere around the Internet. When you look around a website, usually out of nowhere pops these Google Adsense Ads in many many different "colors".

Yet, there are way too many people who fails registering for a Google Adsense account, way too much. Even if there are 100 people out of a million that register fail to apply for Google Adsense, it is still considered A Lot.

I'll explain why. Google has got a blog service atBlogger.com. Yeps, you see it all over the internet too. To register for Google Adsense, don't hesitate on doing one thing. Register Google Adsense with a Blogger.com's Blog URL!

Google loves blog. They are the best source of information around the world. It's where people put in interesting things from the world, people just love it.

So, you want to register for a Google Adsense account, stop hanging in the sky wondering what is the best way. Have yourself gohttp://www.Blogger.com, register, create a blog and fill in what you ate for breakfast today. That easy! After that, gohttp://www.google.com/adsense, and register a Google Adsense account with the Blog URL you have.

You're basically done, wait 3 to 5 days - usually in 3 days, Google Adsense staffs are fast, and you're ready to get your Google Adsense account, cause they're approved!