Payday Loans Review and Keyword Taboos

Payday Loan Review - Part 2 In How to Make Money Online

If you are just joining me may I suggest that you read Payday Loans first so that you will have an idea where I am going with this post.

In my last post "Do you Blog for Money or Readers?" I explained that I want to start playing around with this blog. By this I mean that I want to see what kind of money I can scare up now that I have a PR5 blog that gets crawled several times a day by Google. I discussed the whole notion of writing for readers or for money in the last post but suffice to say that I started this blog for several reasons and making money was certainly one of them.

I get quite a few emails from well-intentioned and polite readers who just want to let me know that I would have a lot more readers if;

- I hosted my own domain.

- got professional graphics

- lose the adsense ads

- use wordpress

- change the layout

- show my picture

These are all really good suggestions if you want to produce a top-shelf A-list style blog. This is what you need to do if you are ever going to get to the top. This is correct but what "TOP" are you getting to? If it's to get to the "TOP" of the Internet Marketing community then this is exactly how you do it. If it's to get to the "TOP" of the search engines then it's not the way to do it at all.

There may be a lot of Money to be had getting on the A-list, I don't know but I'll take everyone's word for it. Aside from selling pagerank I really don't see where the income comes from myself. I suppose they have the traffic numbers to make money off of no-follow advertising. The selling of pagerank is coming to a close so they will have to sustain themselves on ads. With their traffic this will probably suffice... as long as their traffic holds up.

The image below (click to enlarge it) is a snapshot of the backlinks johnchow.com has. It's only a partial list but I didn't need to run all the links to see a pattern. (Note - SEO Elite is brain dead when listing no-follows so ignore the results posted as they are not correct)

The list below contains some of his top links and you will notice the anchor text used in just about all of them contain the keywords "John Chow". This means he should rank really well for the term "John Chow" (he doesn't as he has been manually Googlized and sent to the back of the classroom) and normally he would be number 1 for this. And so he should be. His fans far and wide have linked to him and told Google in the process that this is the site that is most relevant to the term "John Chow". His fans haven't said that he is relevant for "make money online" or any of the related terms in this niche.



There has been a lot written about the johnchow.com saga, how he doesn't rank for his own name and why did Google drop his PR and send him to the back-benches of the "make money online" listings in the serp's. Why they took his own name away I don't know. Why he doesn't rank for the main "make money" keywords is obvious and it has nothing to do with a penalty. He doesn't have any backlinks showing relevance. Take a look at Darren Rowse's Problogger.net backlinks below;



Are you seeing a pattern here?

Problogger has a lot of anchor text stating that this site is relevant to "Darren", "Problogger" and "Darren Rowse". No relevance to "Making Money Online". These two and other big names in the "make money" world do rank fairly well for "make money" keywords but only because of content and the fact that a lot of the backlinks come from relevant sites re: subject matter, even though the anchor text is irrelevant. The thing is these A-listers don't dominate the serp's as far as profitable keywords go. They just hover at the edges.

Look at my backlinks;



Most of my links have "make money" keywords in the anchor. I am also starting to get the dreaded "Grizzly" anchors. I don't want to be relevant to bears. A tip to all of you reading this - if you want to link to someone then take a minute and think about what that site is most relevant to and then use those keywords in the anchor.

For example, I read a post on Courtney Tuttles blog "Make money online Free" this morning and you might want to read it because it tells you what you should do if you want to become an A-lister. He uses humor and gets his point across by showing you what you shouldn't do. Go Read It (It's really quite good)- I'll wait.

OK. I just gave the best type of backlink for his blog. He just got a relevant (to his niche) PR5 site to tell Google that Court's blog is relevant to the term "make money online". Court is another blogger that suffers from backlinks optimized for "court" and "courtney tuttle" but I noticed he does have a good supply of "make money" keywords too.

I like Court and don't want to upset him by showing his links here - the others, oh well, what are they going to do? Link to me? (not that they will ever see this) Lol.

The point I am making is this - there are different ways to make money with your blog and contrary to current thinking - adsense and affiliate sales (niche sites not IM) can earn you a good income and I am betting a better income than most of the A-listers. I know, I know, Adsense is dead! Affiliate sales requires a lot of traffic! Selling Pagerank/paid reviews is where it's at!

Yes, this is the prevailing wisdom and I couldn't be happier. The competition has been dropping like flies for a while now thanks to Google and their slap happy team of geeks. It's great. I love Google.

Every time I hear Adsense is dead I just smile. I'll let you in on a secret - it ain't dead and there is a lot less competition than there used to be. I find it easier now than ever to make money with it.

Back to Payday Loans.

I led you to believe that I had found a goldmine in the previous post on Payday loans. I showed you how many times it gets searched each month and how few sites existed that compete for this term on the serp's. I also mentioned that clicks for adsense ads ran in the $5 and up range. I didn't lie to you as this is a goldmine but I didn't tell you everything either.

Payday Loans is a taboo keyword. It sits along side of "lemon laws", "mesothelioma" and countless other spam keywords introduced to the world by "The Rich Whatever Guy". The reason there are so few sites competing for "payday loans" is because Google wiped the slate clean of the millions of spam sites that used to target this term. If you try and start a new site with taboo keywords in your url, title or sometimes even mention the keywords in your post you will be flagged immediately and ignored - forever. If you are using blogger you will likely see your site disappear before your eyes. Spamblogs are a lot harder to pull off now and this has made it a lot easier for the rest of us to target productive keywords.

Before I go any farther I need to clarify things. If you want to go after adsense revenue then don't do anything the A-listers do. You make money from search traffic with adsense and only if you can get people to stick around long enough to click your ad. If your site looks too professional or too techie or too cerebral or too cluttered you will not keep them around long enough to click anything but the back button - usually before the page finishes loading. If you want adsense revenue then cheesy is the only way.

I have tested every type of layout on my niche sites and have seen the same results over and over again. People who like to read like professional looking sites. People who are shopping for something want highly relevant subject matter with lots of pictures and they only want to see 1 product. People who like to surf aimlessly like cheese. Cheese is non threatening, inviting enough to say "hmmm what's this about", read a few lines and decide if this is what they were looking for - nope but wait this ad looks like it might be what I need. Click and off they go.

This blog is cheese - name, header, sidebar - all cheese.

The first possible thing that any one can click when landing on this page is the money maker. (back icon accepted) The top adsense ad - the $.50 a click ad. Everyday 10 people click that ad. Another 40 people click other ads and each day I make another $10 or more. I used to make $30 to $40 a day on this site but I stopped targeting keywords and started targeting readers. You may say $10 is no big deal and it isn't but compared to what I hear most of you make it is a landslide. Most bloggers I know don't make $10 a month with adsense. I have just over 20 sites pulling in this much a day or more. You do the math - it's the easiest money I know of. I have many many more sites pulling in $3 - $4 a day on top of this. If you don't believe me there is nothing I can say to convince you but then again I am not selling you anything either. Why would I lie?

The reason most of you don't make money with adsense is because you don't optimize your pages for prime keywords and you don't gather backlinks using the prime keywords in the anchor text. You also don't get backlinks to your sub pages - only to your home page. Check the backlink I gave Court - it points to the page the article is on, not his homepage. Your homepage has PR and will get indexed for whatever you have on it today. This will change the next time you make a post. If you had been targeting a keyword today and getting traffic for it you wont see traffic once it hits your sub-page. Unless the sub-page has good PR as well.

The other day I optimized my page for the term "Payday Loans". I did this by using the term in my title, sub header and several times in my post. I also included lots of relevant long tail terms and had relevant content in the post. Google could not mistake what the page was about. After that I sent a few backlinks to the sub-page and home page optimized for the keyword. And then I waited...

I admit that I was nervous doing it - would I be flagged for spam? Blogger has a nice little message it gives you when you have been flagged. Basically they stop you from posting a flagged article until you get a manual review done to ensure that you aren't a spamblog. I was happy to see that I didn't get the message.

I got my first traffic hit the next day. See below.



This wasn't for the term "payday loan" and I didn't expect it to be - I'll explain why in a minute. The hit was for a long tail keyword and this was enough to let me know that Google indexed the page and didn't flag me or drop me to the supplementals.

I also was happy to see my adsense ads on the page slowly converted from make money ads to payday loan ads. I was worried Google would give me the old "public service" ads - a sure sign you are dead in the water.

This is good news and now I know that I can start targeting long tail keywords relevant to payday loans. I will do this gradually in a series of posts. The plan is to crawl to the top of the long tail keywords first which will help me crawl up the main keyword listings in the process. As I get more hits on the long tails I will start getting clicks on the highly targeted ads. I am anxious to see what the CPC will be. If it is high I will keep going with this. If it is under $.30 a click I will abandon this target and find another.

Now here is the real challenge. Getting on page 1 for "Payday Loans". The sites that make it on to page 1 for taboo keywords don't have adsense on them. Generally they don't have any ads on them at all. Why? Because they are actual businesses engaged in providing a product or service related to their niche. The top payday loan sites actually give out payday loans! Sheesh - go figure.

If you have adsense on your site it's pretty obvious to Google that you probably aren't a payday loan company and you're not likely to see page 1. This is just the type of challenge I built this blog for. This is an experiment to see if I can. I have done it before in other niches and I want to see if it can be done with a taboo keyword. I am not going to tell you what I am going to do just yet - I'll fill you in as progress is made.

Having a high PR blog in the "make money online" niche has a huge benefit that my niche sites don't have. In my "shoes" niche I can target lots of keywords related to shoes but as large as this niche is there are only so many profitable keywords. Once I have dominated the money makers there is not much more I can do except wait for the next "ugg boot" or "croc shoe" fad to come along. This doesn't happen often enough. This type of niche does OK on adsense but really makes it's money selling product through affiliate links.

With this blog I have a huge lateral range of keywords that I can target - bigger than any other niche with the exception of "news". Even then I could probably get creative and make any keyword relevant to this blog. If I write a review about the whole payday loan industry and how it has been targeted by spamblogs over the years am I not talking about something that is relevant to my blog as well as giving my readers something that they might be interested in? If Google decides to put a review like that on the front page of the "payday loan" serp are they wrong? It's relevant to people searching for payday loans. What if my article was about scam payday loan companies and what to watch out for? This might be very appropriate for page 1.

I've babbled along as usual but there is one more point to make.

This cheesy little blog is just over 10 months old - it will have made me $20,000 by the time it hits the 1 year mark.

I made most of it in the early days by targeting hot keywords. The keyword below took off for a week and then leveled out. It is still bringing me money at a steady pace as I still rank number one for it.



If you want to make money with adsense then target keywords and optimize each post for that keyword. The tougher the keyword the more posts you will need. You will have to give your whole site relevance to the keyword and not just one page. Get sub-page backlinks with proper anchor text. I have explained how to do this here "How to get Traffic and Backlinks" Don't just target your homepage. It's the sub-page PR where the post will sit for an eternity that needs the backlink. This is important - it will get you lots of pages indexed (high) in the serp's. If all your PR is only on your home page then only the content on the homepage will get high indexing and only until you add a new post.

A final note - if you have read this far then you are one of my readers and not likely someone who found this on the search engines. If you have a blog then you probably belong to one or another of the social networks and have probably made a few friends. Do yourselves a favor and ask your friends to optimize the anchor text in the links they give you. And you do the same for them. You don't want to get ranked high for your names - get ranked for your subject matter.

If you have a nice non cheesy looking site - stick to A-list building and start over with new blogs aimed at adsense. One thing to remember is that Post Titles are extremely important for driving traffic. If you are after readers you need something snappy and memorable to peek a visitors curiosity. "Paris Hilton uses Payday Loan for Coke". If you are after search engine traffic you need keywords in your title and preferably nothing else."Payday Loans" is much better than "How to Get Payday Loans". You can use your A-list blog to help out your newer blogs. When you build up a nice stable of quality content sites you will find there is plenty of money in adsense to make a living.

There are a lot of bloggers who are adamant on getting away from adsense because "Google can't be trusted" or "google will crush you on a whim". This is not true at all. Google has followed a predictable and reasonable path from day one. If you do what they ask then you wont have a problem. This blog is totally white hat and complies with everything Google wants to see. I provide quality content and make the site bot friendly. They don't like spam or anything that manipulates the rankings. I followed the rules and got rewarded with a PR5 - others broke the rules and got downgraded. Google isn't perfect and has made mistakes but in the overall picture they are moving in the right direction. Many will argue with me on this but there is nothing better than a good argument. You can let me have it but keep it civil.

I will keep you updated,

Grizzly

Common Blogging Mistakes - Part 2

I didn't finish my rambling yesterday as I was interrupted by a golf game so I thought I would pick up my train of thought today. I've received a number of emails since yesterday asking about the effects changing a blog's title and/or layout would have on existing traffic. This is a good question and it has several possible answers.

I want to use one blog in particular as an example and I hope Ester won't mind. She has a wonderful daily diary style blog called "My Daily Thoughts" and she has asked if she should change the title to "My Days in my Mind" which is her URL title.

The first thing I should mention is that you will certainly see a drop in traffic whenever you change your blog title. This is assuming that you were receiving hits from people searching for your original title. In Ester's case if people were typing in "My Daily Thoughts" in the search engines to find her then changing her title will have a negative effect. I am only guessing however that she probably doesn't get a lot of traffic - I could be wrong though - from people searching for those keywords.

Blog's like Ester's are a challenge to optimize for traffic. They are a pleasure to read when one finds them but are not the sort of thing that people actively search for on the search engines. Diary style journals typically have wide ranging subject matter and attract a readership based on the author's writing style and likability factor rather than a particular subject matter. Search Engine Optimization is based almost exclusively on subject matter and not aesthetics. Now having said that the search engines will index Ester's blog for lots and lots of terms stemming from her post titles and this, I think is where the traffic will come from. Changing her Blog title at this point is not likely to effect her greatly but I should add that changing it to "My Days in my Mind" is not going to benefit her in the long run anymore than her original title from an SEO perspective. The new title is not likely to be searched for anymore than the original.

If I was to optimize her blog for her I would probably zero in on the Personal development niche and use a title like "My Daily Thoughts - A Road to Personal Development" or "My Daily Thoughts in Search of Self-Fulfillment". The point is to include relevant keywords that are searched for in the search engines. This will eventually bring in relevant traffic that she doesn't get presently and it will not negate any traffic she is currently receiving as her original keywords are still being used.

Let me use my blog as an example of how I target keywords using my blog title.
When I started this blog I had a goal in mind - I wanted to take a completely free service such as Blogger and use a free hosting platform (blogspot.com) and see if it was possible to attain page 1 ranking for a highly competitive keyword - "Make Money Online". To do this I had to identify my intended audience and then decide on my best course of action.

I chose to target internet marketing beginners as I believe they are terribly under served online except as potential customers. There are very few quality sites that provide real step by step instructions for beginners using blogs in the field of internet marketing. Even fewer that provide this information for free. I chose to use a free service and host not because this is the best method but because I wanted to show beginners that they can make money online without spending a single dime. This blog has not cost me a single penny so far and it has made me several thousands of dollars over the past 9 months - the majority of it acquired with adsense.

That was the goal I set out to achieve and while I haven't made page 1 yet I am making steady progress. This morning I ranked number 39 out of 200,000,000 sites indexed for "Make Money Online". Number 16 out of 140,000,000 for "How to Make Money Online". These are from Google.ca (Canada) and my ranking will be a page or two lower on Google.com (USA). A side note: you will rank differently on Google depending on which country the search is instigated in.

Now when I started this blog I chose to use "Make Money for Beginners" as my blog title and managed to get these terms for my URL as well. I didn't bother targeting "Make Money Online" at first as this would have been over reaching. When you start out pick keywords that can be attained in a short period of time. By attained I mean ranking on page 1 of the SERP's. I took over top spot for "Make Money for Beginners" in just over a month after start up. This was relatively easy as there are only 2.5 million competing sites for this term. Are there a lot of searches for this term... not really, maybe 10 - 20 per week but it was a good starting point.

The term allowed me to add more keywords as I gained PR and something I call Google Bot Attraction. What this is I can't explain aside from saying that if the Google Bot was human it likes some sites more than others and tends to crawl favorite sites a lot more than less favored sites. Page rank has some effect on this but there has to be other factors as well based on my experience. If I had to guess I suspect quality content is one such factor. This PR2 blog gets crawled more than several PR4 websites I have and my posts usually draw traffic from Google within an hour after posting. Yesterday's post was indexed about 15 minutes after I posted it. For whatever reason the Google bot likes this blog and zooms in and out frequently.

After three months I noticed that I was getting crawled frequently and I changed my Blog title to "Make Money Online for Beginners". The effect was quite rapid. Within a few days I found that I went from page 3 for the term all the way to top spot on page 1 on Google. I also held onto top spot for the previous term "Make Money for Beginners". Pretty cool I thought. I recently added the words "How to" to my title and sure enough I got top spot the following day for "How to Make Money Online for Beginners" as well. Now I can't say that I get a ton of traffic for these exact terms as most people don't add "for Beginners" to the query. However by adding the "Online" and "How to" terms I noticed that my blog moved up drastically in the SERP's for the terms "How to Make Money Online" and "Make Money Online" which are both found in my Title. Although I haven't made page 1 yet I am seeing 20 - 30 visitors a day now for my primary keyword "Make Money Online" and I can only guess what kind of traffic page 1 will bring.

The point of all this is to plan things out in an achievable fashion when starting your blog. Pick your primary keyword and then use "long tail" keywords that compliment your primary keyword as a starting point. As more an more of your long tails' get indexed and achieve high ranking they boost your primary keyword ranking in the process and more importantly bring in traffic for secondary keywords related to your niche. If you only concentrate on your primary keyword you will spend a long time without any traffic at all and find it hard to ever see high rankings. Google wants to see a consistent and sustained pattern of keyword relevancy regarding your subject matter before it will reward you with high rankings.

In the past spamblogs would simply pick a popular keyword like "Lemon Laws" and then proceed to post thousands of pages of drivel using the term "Lemon Laws" over and over again in order to out "Lemon Law" the competition. This fooled Google for a time but now the algorithm wants to know why there aren't other relevant terms for the main subject in the posts. You have to include lots of relevant long tail keywords in your content now or you will be flagged and ignored.

The best way to bolster your Blog title and hence your primary keyword is the often overlooked "blog description" area. With websites this is contained in the Meta Tags and it is now ignored by Google and a few other search engines thanks to keyword stuffing abusers. It is not ignored on blogspot blogs however and is a very powerful aid for getting your secondary keywords ranked.

This is the wording used to describe your blog located right below your Blog Title. I change mine all the time when I want Google to rank me higher for recent popular searches. My Blog Title tells Google that in general this blog is about how to make money online. My description tells Google the specifics of how this is done. When I find popular subjects like "Project Payday" or "Yahoo Answers" I quickly do a little research, write a few posts and then change my description to let Google know that I cover these popular subjects and more importantly I let searchers know it too as my description is displayed in the SERP's. This works like a charm and gets me ranked well for just about any topic I choose. A word of caution though. Each time you make a change there is a delay of a few days to maybe a week that you will see a drop off in traffic as Google drops your rankings for previous terms that you have removed from your description. It usually takes a good week before your new terms are indexed and start drawing traffic.

Ok, I've rambled on enough but before I stop I just want to make a few comments on Google Page Rank and Alexa's traffic stats.

The Page Rank update is long overdue and is frequently discussed online these days. Who knows why it has been so long delayed but quite frankly it is a historical number and is not important save for a few programs like payperpost and such that require a certain page rank before accepting you in. CPA programs are the most notable ones for requiring PR before allowing you to collect leads for them. Advertisers place a lot of stock in it but they really should look at traffic instead. For most people the PR you see is quite useless. It simply shows the PR of a page the last time it was updated but it does not tell you the current PR. My PR is 2 but that was what Google deemed it almost 6 months ago. My current PR is unknown and this is the problem with pagerank in the first place. It is not fluid but static - showing only what you were and not what you are. Don't get hung up on that little green bar.

Alexa is one of the crappiest things to have invaded the online world in my opinion. People live and breathe over it and most don't understand that it is so inaccurate as to traffic that it should be ignored. The numbers it spits out are always contrary to your own traffic stats and this is for a number of reasons; it only gathers data from surfers who have the alexa toolbar installed on their browsers. 99% of all internet surfers don't have this toolbar and have never heard of Alexa. Only techies and internet marketers use it. If you have a site that attracts techies or IM'ers then you probably have a decent Alexa ranking but it still won't reflect your true numbers. If your site is about shoes then you won't have much of a ranking at all. My best niche site has over a thousand visits a day and my alexa rank is 2,000,000 and change. This blog gets about 300 - 400 visitors a day and it ranks 180,000 give or take. Go figure. While you are ignoring the little green Google bar you can just as easily ignore the little blue Alexa bar as well.

Please don't ignore me though...

Cheers

Grizzly

Common Blogging Mistakes

What's in a Name?

I am currently on a little golfing vacation and this time I brought along the old laptop in order to catch up on a backlog of emails I've received. My golfing really sucks but I have managed to put a good dint in my "to do" email list. While answering your questions and reviewing the blogs my readers have asked me to look at I have compiled a small list of things that many of you are a bit confused about.

The number one question is always about traffic. Why aren't you getting any? Let me sum this up with one question. When you started your blogs who were you hoping to attract? Let me put it this way. You start a blog about the trials and tribulations of making money online as a work at home mom and call your blog "My Life Online". (I made that up) The problem with this is that there is no way the search engines can categorize your site for your niche. Your blog title is the primary keyword(s) used by the search engines in deciding what your blog is about. Next in importance is your blog description and then comes your post title and finally your header titles.

Sure you can call your blog "My Life Online" or "Bob's Blog" and still get relevant traffic if you keep using your primary keywords throughout the rest of your pages but this is making things a lot harder than it has to be. Google will figure out what you are about eventually but you will find it hard getting to the top of the rankings if your primary keyword isn't in your Title. Yes, John Chow dot Com made it to number one for the term "Make Money Online" but this is the exception rather than the rule and he did it by garnering an insane amount of backlinks optimized for his keywords. He also went too far and got himself Google bombed right off the front page in the end but that is another story. Make it easy for the search engines... use your main keyword in your blog title.

If available you should also try and include your main keyword in your URL as well or some variation of it.

The bots that crawl your pages start at the top left corner and work down to the bottom right. Do not put anything irrelevant in the top left portion of your page as this is what is used to categorize your page for both indexing and adsense ads. Let me explain this further as it is very important and even experienced marketers don't seem to understand this.

Google will index your page using your blog title followed by the first line of html text it sees. Make sure the first line of text is your page title. Make sure your page title contains the keyword you are trying to get traffic for. Make sure your page title is alluring enough to get people to visit as this is what they are presented in the SERP's. (Search Engine Results Pages) This may seem obvious to you but I have critiqued a number of blogs lately that have started their posts with sentences like "Thank you for coming to my site" or "Welcome to my blog" or "Part 2 in my continuing journey online". This is what gets indexed and people searching on the engines are not likely to click on these sites as they won't have a clue as to what these sites are about.

Your page Title and post title specifically is what Google uses to send you relevant adsense ads. If your blog is about cats and you use a post title like "Why dogs suck and cats don't" you will get ads for dogs, cats and pets in general. This might be fine but if your readers are cat lovers you wont get the best ads available. The more you optimize your post title and post content the more Google optimizes the ads it sends you. I want to explain this in further detail as a lot of people don't understand adsense at all.

Let's say you start a blog called "Cats" and your first post is titled "Why I love Cats". Wonderful. Your post rambles on about all the reasons you love cats. So far you have told Google exactly what your blog is about and that your post is most likely about four legged cute little furry hairballs and not about a Broadway musical. You will get indexed for cats. You might get some traffic but not much. You will get adsense ads for cat related products... perhaps even for tickets to a musical. The problem is that your ads will be low paying and your traffic will be browsers - people out for a sunday drive. Why? You are far too general in content and this is not how to attract readers or how to get the best paying adsense ads.

You can use the blog title "Cats" but your post title must zero in on something specific about cats and then your post should expand on this theme. Try "Common Cat Diseases and Treatments" or "How to Maintain a Healthy Cat". By doing this you will draw a targeted audience and moreover you will get better targeted ads... ads that pay more and are more likely to be clicked on. Most marketers don't realize that Google rewards good quality sites with the best ads and sends low paying ads to poor content sites. The more optimized your posts are the more optimized your ads will be.

The ads on this blog average about 35 cents a click and often produce 50 cents a click. I have even had $1 a click days but this is usually when a beginner starts using adwords and bids way to high on keywords. They don't last long and learn an expensive lesson. Most of the marketers I know in the "make money online" racket are getting 3 cent clicks and the reason is simple. Home page optimization. Huh?

Your home page gets the bulk of your traffic. This is true for everyone and it tends to have the highest page rank. A blogs home page is different than a website's home page. Bloggers tend to post several posts on their home pages usually in snippet form with a link to the full article on a separate page. This looks good and gives the reader lots stuff to read. All in all this has become the norm for blogging and I don't disagree with the practice at all. I don't do it though and this is why. The majority of ads clicked are on the home page and not on secondary pages. Why. People reading further into your blog have found what they are looking for and aren't clicking on ads. People on your homepage have not found what they wanted and click your ads in hopes of better luck elsewhere. Blogs that use several posts on their homepage aren't optimized for adsense - too many subjects and post titles - the content is varied because the page contains several different subjects and the Google bot doesn't know what the page is about specifically. The end result is that the page will receive general ads based on the overall content of the blog and this means low paying ads.

I only post one article per page including the home page. Each page is optimized around one subject and Google sends me the most relevant ads which also pay the most. The downside of this is that I don't get as many page views as regular bloggers but I do make more money from adsense. If you are skeptical just test this on your own blog. This blog makes an average of $8.83 a day with adsense and that is way more than most blogs. I have had a number of people ask me why I only use 1 post on my front page and this is why. It pays better.

Ok.. there was more I wanted to yak about but I tee off in half an hour so maybe I will just post this and pick up again next time.

Cheers,

Grizzly

Why Article Content Really is King

Optimizing your Blog - Why your article content matters.

This may shock some of you but your content has more to do with your search engine page rankings than any other factor - period. It has become increasingly clear that Google has tweaked it's algorithm in this direction for some time now and despite how many backlinks you have or what kind of pagerank you achieve - your content is the overriding determinant in how well your pages get ranked in the searches.

How do I know this?

I have been experimenting for some time now using SEO techniques, backlinking strategies, website design, blog design, hosting platforms, black hat, grey hat, white hat and every other kind of gimmick, trick and sorcery I know of and the inescapable conclusion is this - my best performing sites to date are all low PR, low age simple blogs either hosted here on blogspot or on my own domains. Most have few backlinks and none have any high PR backlinks. By "best performing" I mean simply that these blogs have the most pages ranked on pages 1-3 in the SERP's for the keywords I have targeted and hence they pull in the most free traffic.

Does this surprise you?

I admit that I was surprised at first but have come to see the pattern developing. Google has one overriding goal - give the end user (the searcher or reader) the exact information they are looking for and compared to a few years ago they are achieving this in spades. When you search for something today on Google you usually find exactly what you are looking for. In days past you had to sift through a lot of garbage before finding what you wanted. How Google has achieved this is a credit to the "Brains" behind their engine and while most internet marketers have grumbled and whined over the changes that have crippled their former empires I have come to relish these changes. And so should you.

What this now means.

Google has leveled the playing field for everyone. In the past the folks who made money online had all the resources and knowledge necessary for gaming the engines. Newcomers had a steep learning curve and in most cases didn't stand a chance of reaching the top pages in the SERP's. That has now changed. Anyone can get top ranking by doing what Google wants you to do and you don't need deep pockets to do it.

So what exactly does Google want you to do?

Produce good quality content. Original content.

Anything else? Nope... not really but you can help yourself out by producing it in a search engine friendly way which I will explain shortly.

Over the past few months I have created a number of niche blogs ranging from shoes to recipes for cooking fish. All of them were indexed within 2-3 days by Google. All of them had traffic within a week of creation. 1 blog had traffic 26 minutes after I created it. All of them have pages on the 1st page of the SERP's. Most got there within 2 weeks. Those with less competition got higher ranking faster.

The blog that got indexed and sent traffic in 26 minutes floored me but it also told me that what I was doing was all that needed to be done. The blog btw is in a hugely competitive market but the keyword I targeted was not optimized by others. In case you're wondering it was "how to cook (a certain type of fish)". A small niche to be certain but I get 30 - 40 visitors a day for it. This might not sound like much but I have added a lot more pages to the blog all optimized for related keywords and the blog is now pulling in 200 plus visits a day and I make $3-$4 daily from adsense and have made 4 affiliate sales. The blog is just over a month old.

So what is my system?

This is where I am supposed to hit you up with a sales pitch for my ebook. Send me money and I'll tell you. Lucky for you I'm too lazy to bother with setting all of that up and writing the book so I'll just tell you.

Here it is.

Create your blog using your main keyword in your Title.

Write your first post using your main keyword in the post Title, the first paragraph and use it again in the last sentence of the post.

Link the post Title back to your blog.

Don't over use your keyword in the main content of your post but try and use 5 or 6 related keywords a couple of times each throughout your post. If you are talking about "Fishing Recipes" then use related terms like "trout", "perch", "bass" and so on in your text. This tells the search engine that your content is on topic and makes your page easier to categorize. Think of it this way. If you are trying to get ranked for "Car Insurance" and all you write about in your content is "Car Insurance" then you will get categorized under "Car Insurance" and ranked about 2 million. If you mention several models and makes of cars in your post and several types of insurance plans available then you will get categorized for not only "car Insurance" but for all the more specific terms as well. It is these specific terms that will get higher rankings and all of them will boost your main keyword's ranking in the process.

Each new post should have your blog's main keyword in it but you want to write each new post on a specific sub topic of your main keyword. If my blog's main keyword is "Fishing Recipes" then each page will concentrate on a different fish and recipe. In time you will build up your main keyword while getting indexed for highly specific or targeted sub keywords or "long tails" as they are known.

Post at least three times a week for the first two months.

Do not add adsense or advertising or affiliate products to your blog for at least a month after getting indexed. If you do you will slow down your rankings or lose position on the SERP's. By not monetizing your blog you appear to be a credible source of information for the search engines. You can add this later but expect to see at least a slight drop in your rankings when you do. I have tested this extensively and can say without a doubt that you will always rank higher without monetization.

Have an "about me" section which gives your name, address and contact info. This makes you more credible. The more info you give the better although most people do not want to do this. This is not mandatory as you won't be penalized for not doing it. You will rank better if you do is all.

That's it for on page SEO

Now for off page SEO.

Get indexed.

To do this don't bother submitting your site to the search engines or directories. Waste of time and quite frankly you don't need to.

I use a link from a PR7 site to get indexed immediately. Most of you won't have this option so do the next best thing. Put your link on a high PR site. How? Submit an article to ezine articles (PR6). The bots crawl it several times daily. When it gets crawled, your article gets crawled and the bot follows your link all the way to your new blog. You can also set up a page (lens) on Squidoo for the same results.

It might take 2-3 days before you actually see it indexed on the search engines but this is only because they can be slow to update their results. When you do see it you will notice that the blog was actually picked up a few days earlier.

Submitting to Propeller (formerly netscape) also works just as well.

You are just about done. All that is left is to boost your pages up the search engine rankings. This is done by obtaining a few decent backlinks.

How?

Articles. I know you hate writing but there is some work involved in making money online.

For each post you write on your blog you should write 2 to 3 similar but not duplicate articles emphasizing the same keywords and submit them to different article directories. Start with Ezine articles and GoArticles. There are hundreds of article directories out there and you can find them with a little Google search. Use the highest PR sites first. Each time your article is picked up and posted on someone else's site you get a little link juice back to your blog. Don't write crap. Make your articles useful and compelling - people will want to use them for their own readers. Don't just put your link in the Author's box - this gets left off when people only post a snippet of your article on their site. This is when they only use your first paragraph and then put a link back to the original article so readers can read the rest if they choose. Put your link in the first sentence of the article using your keyword as the anchor text.


Anything else?

Nope.

This is all I have done recently and it works like a charm. It works because I have concentrated on giving Google good quality original content. They reward me by ranking my pages high in the SERP's. I outrank about.com, Squidoo, Wikipedia and a host of high PR sites with my 1-2 month old blogs for one main reason. The content on my pages are more optimized and relevant to the subject matter than what the competition has produced on their pages. I don't have PR or many useful links so what else could it be. The simple fact is that your content will win out over PR if you write quality.

A note on quantity.

I am not positive but I am beginning to believe that quantity also has a great deal to do with this as well. I don't mean how many pages but rather how much I write on each subject. It appears that the more exhaustive I am the better. I tend to write long and extensive articles. Most bloggers write snippets. From Google's point of view who gives the most information - a 250 word article on a single topic or a 3000 word article on the same topic but also includes info on relevant topics. Would Google rank Joe Bloggers 1000 word post on "war and Peace" as more relevant than some old Russian dudes 2 million word post on "War and Peace"? Not likely. Now having said that keep your reader in mind always. The reader wants info but probably doesn't want to spend all week reading it. There is a fine balance to be had between giving lots of info and too much info.

On that note...

Try it out.

It works.

Grizzly

More Google Tips and SEO Tricks

In my last post How to Get Google Page Rank and BackLinks I discussed the importance of getting properly optimized backlinks for your site and how this makes a huge difference in your Google Page rank.

Since the post I have been inundated with lots of questions and have decided to break down Google as best as I can in order to clear up a lot of misconceptions and point you all down the correct path.


The most asked question had to do with my assertion that two-way backlinks should be avoided.

One of my readers left this comment;

Cheryl said...

Is this really true about two-way backlinks not being valuable? I'm a newbie at this SEO thing and there's people who say that this is a no-no and others who claim there is no such thing as giving away link juice.

In LOOOOOVE with your blog BTW!

First off Cheryl... I'm in LOOOOOOVE with people like you who leave such nice comments. Thank you - you made my day for that.

As to your question - there is disagreement over two-way links because each of us has a different priority with regards to backlinks. I should have clarified this from the outset.

Two-way backlinks can bring you traffic. If we exchange links then some of my readers will visit your site and some of your readers will visit my site. This is all good... if you already have Page Rank and are only concerned with increasing traffic from like minded sites. If you took the time and collected hundreds of these type of links then you might get a decent amount of traffic to your site.

The thing is though, achieving a high page rank from Google will always get you more traffic than exchanging two-way links. If you want to attain a high page rank then the single best way to do this is with one-way links. Google is not stupid - in fact the brains behind the Google algorithms are among the sharpest people in the business and they look at backlinks in a very pragmatic way. If all your links are two-way the thinking is as follows;

- if your links are from related sites only, Google will give you some credit and not penalize you. They will know however that you got the link by asking for it and this means that it is not a natural link brought about because your site is seen as an important resource in your niche. In short a two-way link to a related site doesn't tell Google that you are special.

- if your links are from unrelated sites then Google will penalize you. The thinking is that if your "Dog Grooming" site is getting links from "Casino" sites and "real Estate" sites then you have joined a link exchange program and your links are not only un-natural but you are pointing your readers to sites that have nothing to do with the subject matter that brought them to you in the first place.

Always remember that Google is the top search engine for a reason - they are concerned about providing the best results available for any search term. People will stop using them if searches don't provide the info people are looking for.

If a site on "Dog Grooming" has thousands of two-way links to it and Google didn't care how good the links were, the site would reach the number 1 position in the SERP's. The problem is that this site might have very little info on it for people looking to groom their dog. Until the last Google Slap this is exactly what was happening in the search results. People (yes I am guilty as well) who knew how to set up adsense spam sites with tons of links to it were beginning to dominate all the top search positions. This had Google in a flap - both Google and myself were making a killing from the adsense clicks that resulted when someone showed up at my Dog grooming site. My site had no usable info on it yet it ranked number 1 because I had hundreds of two-way links to it. The reader would notice the adsense ads which did appear to offer the info they were looking for and presto... they would click and Google and myself made money. The problem for Google was this - while they made a ton of money from this they realized that this would be short lived as people would stop using them if the search results didn't improve. In the end Google Slapped the hell out of all the adsense sites by changing the Algorithm so that only one-way links from related sites would gain you page rank. The higher the page rank of the linking site the higher your page rank would become.

If you think about it this new system does make a lot of sense.

If your Dog Grooming site has only 4 backlinks and my site has 1000 backlinks, who should rank higher in the SERP's?

You might think the site with 1000 backlinks.

What if your 4 backlinks were all one-way and from 4 PR5 sites that have been around a long time and are all Dog Grooming sites. What if my 1000 links were all two-way and from sites that were brand new and few if any had anything to do with dog grooming.

Knowing this you can now see why Google would rank the site with only 4 very natural and high quality links much higher in the SERP's than the site with a 1000 poor quality links. The searcher is far more likely to find the answers they are looking for from your site than mine.

The only reason 4 high PR sites would link to you is because they feel you have something to offer or you paid them for the links. (More on this shortly)

Any crappy site can get a 1000 two-way backlinks. Only a legitimate site can get high PR one-way backlinks.

Paid Backlinks

After the Google Slap all of us with adsense sites quickly saw our money evaporate and a lot of the spammers got out of the business. The smart ones didn't give up so easily though. If Google wanted quality one-way backlinks then so be it. In fact the Google slap did us a favour - it got rid of all our competition and allowed those of us left to really dominate the SERP's. How? Simple - we went out and found all the relevant "real" sites with high page rank and offered these sites money to put a one-way link on their site pointing to our sites. Sure this cost a few bucks but what the heck, we were back in business and making even more money than before since 80% of our former competition was gone.

Ooops... said Google. They fixed one problem and suddenly a new one surfaced. Damn spammers.

To correct this Google is now talking of penalizing paid links. This is the buzz at the moment and has people in a new uproar. While this makes perfect sense from Googles point of view, the word on the street is that they will have a hard time pulling this off. How do they know what links are paid for and which links are natural without having a human being check out every site to see if it is a spam site - either giving the link or getting the link? Of course sites with hundreds or thousands of out going links will be easy to spot as likely paid links.

If they penalize people for having static links (side panel links and banner ads) then they will hurt a lot of legitimate affiliate sites in the process. The consensus seems to be that instead of penalizing them these links just won't count as high as one-way links that are seen to be the most natural, links which are one-way links contained in articles or other informational text posted on a page.

This is what I meant in my last post when I said that there is a "Perfect Link".

A perfect link is one that is part of the text on a page, on a site that has both high Page Rank and has been around a year or longer and the linking anchor text (wording in the link) is perfectly optimized for your sites keywords.

A link like this is seen and rightly so, as most likely being natural and offering the reader valuable information. Why would an older established site with a PR5 write an article on some subject and include a link in the text to your site unless they felt their readers could benefit from you. OK... true I could pay them but most sites like this have credibility - they aren't spam sites - and they actually do care about the info they supply their readers. It's one thing to get them to put up a banner or static advertiser link as they know that their readers don't hold them accountable for ads. It's another thing to get them to post a link to a spam site in the middle of an article on a topic their readers have come to read for information. Needless to say the readers will be upset at this and therefore, the site is not likely to take your money for a paid article link.

The end result is that Google sees these types of links as being the least corrupted and will reward you most for them.

How to get the Perfect BackLink?

The last post explained this so I will just quickly recap.

Articles, articles and more articles. And make sure they are unique articles. You write articles with your embedded anchor text link in it and other sites like what they see, feel their readers will find the article useful and they will post it on their site. Simple.

Well almost... You won't get many PR4 and up sites posting your articles. Why? They usually write their own stuff. You will get lesser PR sites posting your links though and this will get you some PR. What you are really hoping for is that you get 1 high PR site to link to you. This 1 site can boost your PR a lot provided you aren't being penalized for other infractions like too many two-way backlinks or paid one-way links or links coming from a link farm or links from irrelevant sites.

The Google Silver Lining

Since a lot of you are new at this I know that most of you are thinking that getting perfect links is going to be hard to achieve - yes they will. The thing is you only need a few of them to make a difference. I mentioned in the last post that I have written about 2 dozen articles linking to this blog. From people who have downloaded my articles I have about 700 links accrued over the last six months - the age of this blog. Most of the links are from new sites with no page rank and are sitting in the Google Sandbox. 20 links are from sites with PR and I have 2 PR7 links, 1 PR6 link, 1 PR5 link and 3 PR4 links. These are all I need and they will do more for me than the other 693 links combined and I got them by writing articles. Nothing more.


Ok... I know, I know. You hate writing, you're no good at it, you don't have the time. You really want me to tell you how you can achieve PR without writing. I have bad news for you. You can't unless you are willing to spend money having people like me do your writing for you. You can use Private Label Rights (PLR) and free articles instead of unique content but not for your main site or blog. (More on this below).

If you are trying to create a prosperous online business with your own website or blog you need unique content to do it. The only content that Google sees is good old html text or in simple terms the words you are currently reading. If you can't or won't write and/or don't want to pay for it, then I suggest you concentrate on affiliate marketing with PPC and stay away from creating your own sites. (You will still need to write good ad copy though)

I realize that most of you don't want to hear this. The ability to write or lack thereof is the single biggest factor in how successful your website or blog will be. Face it, you only read stuff online if it is well written and informative. If a site has everything you need but is poorly written and ugly you won't stick around long - you will find a site that appeals to you. Graphics and layout might please you but poor writing will turn you off in a hurry. You won't care if a site has a terrible layout if the writing is great. As big and complex as the cyberworld is - it all still comes down to just two things; Eyeballs and the written word. (OK Video is becoming huge but dialogue still has to be written)

Websites need unique well written copy to succeed.

Articles have to be well written or no one will post them.

Affiliate marketing requires exceptionally well written sales pages and adwords copy to succeed.

It doesn't matter what niche or market you are after on the net - to succeed you will need well written copy of one kind or another. You can become a spammer and try and make a living but I can assure you that this road is always short lived and you work your ass off.

I mentioned a Google Silver Lining and here it is. If you do what Google wants you to do then they will reward you for it. While not confirmed (Gurus Cody Moya and Matt Garrett feel it is valid) it is now believed that Google will award you with a PR4 ranking if you meet certain criteria. I have found this too be true from my own sites so I tend to think it must be true. Here it is...

If your site is old enough (6 months to a year or older) and you have at least one hundred pages of content then you will get a PR4 ranking. This is only if you haven't done something to piss Google off and been penalized for it. I have found that this works for both my original content blogs and my PLR blogs. I will explain the difference.

I have been experimenting with blogs that are 100% white hat and blogs that use a lot of black/grey hat techniques to see how well they climb the Google ladder. The blog you are reading is one of my white hat blogs. With this blog I have about 140 pages of unique content. I have a second IM blog much like this one - same age and subject matter - but it has 200 plus pages of duplicate content or snippets as they are known. Simply put it is the type of blog that has several paragraphs of snippets posted on each page that link back to the original sources. I don't do any writing for the second blog - just RSStoBlog all the posts. (You non-writers can do this as well).

So far the two blogs are equal as far as Google is concerned regarding Page Rank - both are PR2 at the moment. When the next Google page rank update occurs (every three months - last was end of April/early May) I will find out if they make it to PR4.

The difference in the two blogs is this. This blog has a lot of good backlinks - the second blog doesn't have any good backlinks at all.

This blog has a decent subscriber list. The second blog has none.

This blog makes very little money - hardly any adsense revenue and as one reader pointed out - hardly any affiliate sales either as I seem to keep giving away stuff for free to those that ask. The second blog is making decent money from both adsense and affiliate sales.

This blog has decent google traffic and lots of return visitors. The second blog gets no free traffic to speak of and no return visitors.

This blog has cost me nothing and the second blog has PPC fees every month.

This blog ranks high in the SERP's for a lot of my keywords - the second blog doesn't rank well for anything.

So which is better. Depends really. If I was after money quickly then the second blog is better. In the long run I will make more money from this one as it has the proper base to grow with. The second blog is really just the new way to create a spam blog that slips past Google's rules. It isn't really spam as it does have good content on it - just not my own unique content. Like a spam blog it is set up to get the reader to click away from it - either to an affiliate page or on the adsense ads. Because it has good content though it doesn't get flamed as a spam site.

The Duplicate Content Penalty

The Duplicate Content "penalty" is largely misunderstood by webmasters.

First of all Google will penalize duplicate content within the same site, to make
sure that only one copy of a page is shown.

Where Google finds content that is essentially the same on different sites, the
version with the higher "authority" (pagerank) will be shown in the SERP's and the other page(s) may end up in the supplemental results, but they will not receive a PR penalty. This is because doing so would penalize a lot of major publications like the New York Times et al who all use duplicate content that they pull from the wire services. Google can't call the New York Times a spammer and doesn't want to - they only want to get rid of the junk - not content that is useful, duplicate or not.

So using PLR or free articles is ok, although I would recommend using unique content on the home page of your website and only unique content for your main blog.

I also believe it is worth creating new "Title" and "Description" Meta Tags on the article pages, as well as changing the title of the article. This can help to get clicks in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) if people do find your site, but again it is not strictly necessary.

If either of my two IM blogs makes PR4 then I will simply link the higher one to the lower one. If both achieve PR4 I won't link them at all. I will use both as the anchor sites for complete blog empires that will target long tail keywords - each blog will focus on one keyword each.

This has been a long winded answer to Cheryl's question but I hope it clears up some of the confusion regarding Google and it's rules when it comes to backlinks.

While I'm on topic I thought I might give you a few more pointers, especially for those of you just starting out. I have laid out the proper way to set up a blog in previous posts so I will skip this and get right to the next step.

When starting out I suggest you concentrate on one blog only and allow yourself 6 months to get it to a PR4. Do this by creating 100 or so unique pages of content on your blog and if possible create another 20 or so articles for submission to article submission sights.

If you do nothing else I guarantee that this along with my SEO tips (previous posts) will get your site indexed fast and give you a PR4 at the end of the six months. Don't worry if you have no traffic and aren't making any money with this method - once you have a PR4 you will start making money. There are many reasons for this and I will get into more details in my next post. Just know that a PR4 site is very useful for making money in many ways; you can sell backlinks for one thing, you can use it to get all your other blogs ranked high or you can sell your site for some decent money. These are but a few examples but the key to an online business is getting that first site on top of the charts and using it to grow the rest of your empire. Six months may seem a long time to wait but it is well worth it in the long run.

Some Black Hat Tips

Some of you (actually a lot of you) keep asking about Black hat techniques. I would be a hypocrite to tell you to avoid these techniques as I use a lot of black hat tricks myself. What I will tell you is to stay away from anything that can get your main site penalized. You can experiment with other sites until you master what you are doing.

Rule number 1 - until you know what you are doing never black hat a site that you have Google Adsense ads on. You do not want Google to ban you. This will take away the easiest source of income on the net.

Rule number 2 - don't black hat a site that has a good PR. It's not worth losing your PR to save a little time.

Rule number 3 - refer to the first two rules. Always weight the downside against the upside before you do anything.

Ok. I am not going to tell you how to use software to create hundreds of spam blogs full of machine created content. Yes this is done all the time but most people doing it don't have a clue and end up banned. One day I will detail how this is done properly but for now stay away from this.

The type of black hat that I use most often is more refined in nature.

For example.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to piss off a lot of the Gurus and wannabees who dominate the Internet Marketing niche. Why? Hell why not.

To this end I have targeted the "Greatest, latest must have product of the month" crowd. I'm sure you know what I mean. Every month we see a launch for some "program" that the Gurus assure us we can't live without. Without question this stuff is aimed at newbies and equally without question these programs are outright crap or at best are to advanced for beginners to gain anything from. A lot of it is just rehashed ebooks with new titles and labels. Mostly it just makes me gag and I just want to make their lives (Gurus) a bit more difficult.

How do you make it more difficult for them to sell crap to beginners? Easy. I target every new product (that is popular, meaning Guru driven) with a review. So what you say, there are lots of review sites out there. This is true but let me ask you - how many reviews do you read that are real reviews and not just affiliates selling the product under the guise of a review. Not many.

Pay attention - Google likes review sites. Google likes Blogs. Google really likes blogs that have reviews. People looking to buy stuff like reading reviews of the stuff before buying. It only takes one well written negative review to convince someone not to buy a product. How many affiliate reviews endorsing a product do you read before deciding to buy? Probably a few, in fact you aren't looking for an endorsement - you are looking to see if there are any negative reviews. If there aren't any then you will likely buy the product and the endorsement reviews won't sway you much. Human nature 101... if nothing bad has been said about something then it must be good. Right?

And now here is a tip you probably don't know. The first page of the SERP's list all the most relevant sites for a particular query. Most people assume that everything else being equal the highest PR site will get top spot and then each spot for the rest of the top 10 will descend in order of PR.

If you Google the following query, "Roadmap to Riches Review" you will see a list of sites offering reviews of this new program.

Of the 10 sites, you will notice that most are affiliate sites with fake reviews but there is always 1 site with a negative review on the first page (if a negative review exists) and it makes the front page regardless of its PR. You will also usually find a site selling something related to the review product, again regardless of PR - normally some book from Amazon. You will also notice that one of the sites might be an alternate media site (a video site like youtube) which again makes the front page without any PR. You will find page 2 and 3 of the SERP's loaded with much higher PR sites than the 2 or 3 sites I just outlined that make page 1. Why?

The reason is that Google wants the person who is doing the search to have as many options as possible concerning their query. The person asked for a review of a product. Would Google be providing the reader with all the facts if they only listed the top ten PR sites who all happen to be in favour of the product. Maybe the reader wants a negative opinion as well. Google gives them the highest PR negative opinion on page one as well as the highest PR favorable opinion. They also give the reader the option of seeing a video if available as well as the option to view a similar product to the one queried. Because of Googles algorithm you can get a low PR site on page one right beside the high PR sites and ahead of lots of other sites that outrank you by simply being one of the options Google wants to provide the searcher.

In the example query "Roadmap to Riches Review" this blog sat in position 3 on page 1 for the past week or so until today when a negative review on Digg booted me off the page. I sat there for a week in spite of my low PR surrounded by and ahead of sites with a much higher PR.

Being bounced by Digg is OK with me... the posting on Digg is for my blog article that Digg bounced in the first place. Actually this is better because I am still getting the same traffc I was but now I have a high PR site like Digg giving me a backlink.

The end result is that I know my negative review of Roadmap to Riches has thwarted a few sales ( read the review - I really hate 2-up schemes as they prey on newbies more than any other kind of program ) and I created lots of traffic to my site in the process.

and now the black hat part...

Because this program is popular I had a lot of negative review competitors to beat out for that spot on page 1. I did this with a little trick and using some other sites I own. First I linked a couple of PR3 sites to my post to give the page some credibility and then I keyword stuffed this blog page.

A few days back I listed all the keywords that people have used that culminated with them finding my site. I put this all together at the bottom of my page and waited for the Google Bot. Once my page was indexed by Google I removed all the keywords and waited for what years of experimenting told me would happen.

The next day I received the most visitors ever and made the most adsense revenue since I started this blog.

The reason is simple. Google will look at your page and figure out what it thinks you are about based on your keywords. A normal page using our example above would use the term Roadmap to Riches as the main keyword and will get traffic from people searching for that specific term. They won't rank as high for a misspelled term or for any other version of the query like Road Map to Riches or Road to Rich etc. A site that has every misspelling and every variation or at least lots of variations will get traffic from everybody and not just the people who typed in the correct phrase.


Once indexed I started getting tons of traffic because Google figured I was not only a negative review site in a sea of affiliate sites but I also had so many variations of the main keyword that my site just had to have something for everyone searching for Roadmap to Riches info. Bang I was in position 3 on page 1 overnight.

My adsense revenue increased partly because of the increase in visitors but mostly because the searcher couldn't find what they were looking for. People who found me using "ROADMAP TO RICHES +FORUM" quickly found out that I wasn't a forum but my adsense ads were full of Roadmap to Riches ads that they clicked on hoping to find what they were looking for in the first place. The fact that I had removed the stuffed keyword text by the time they found my site would have left them baffled as to why Google would index me for their particular search as none of the keywords remained on my pages.

This is black hatting. I only did it to show you how black hatters can manipulate Google and make money in the process. Before you try this let me warn you about a few things.

Google can usually tell when a site is stuffed with keywords and will penalize you for it. If you use a keyword more than 3 0r 4 times for every 100 words of text then you are seen as stuffing.

Normally I would never do something like this on a white hat blog like this. I do this to niche sites all the time. If my site is about Black Labrador Dogs and I see that cocker spaniels are suddenly getting lots of searches I will stuff my Black Lab page full of cocker spaniel keywords ( surrounded by tons of other text ), wait until google indexes me and then delete all the spaniel references except the Title and a few well placed keywords. Along come some visitors who can't find what they were looking for who then click the adsense ads which are showing cocker spaniel ads and voila - instant money.

Note: Your post title is the single biggest determining factor in what ads google places on your site. If it can't get a good idea of what your post is really about then it will use the keywords in your title. This is why you have different ads on different pages of the same blog. The ads are not blog specific - they are page specific.

To get the cocker spaniel ads I just call the post "Cocker Spaniels" and then proceed to talk about Black Labs for the rest of the post except to throw the Cocker Spaniel keyword into the first paragraph and the last sentence of the post. I also make sure not to use any other defining keywords more than once or twice. I don't want google to know what the page is about so that they give me ads based on my title.

I am not saying that the post is unreadable - it is - I never use content generated by machines. If a snooping Google employee was to read my post they would see a perfectly fine post about why I like Black Labs more than I like Cocker Spaniels. I just happened to optimize the post for Cocker Spaniels when I should have used Black Labs more in my keyword selection. A reader would not see a spam post, just a post that they thought was going to talk about Cocker Spaniels and does a little but not enough to satisfy their interest... wait look, this adsense ad might just be the ticket.

And that is how black hatting is done tactfully.

I am not suggesting that any of you should go down this path but I know a lot of you will try and I just don't want you to make the kinds of mistakes that will get you banned.

Ok this post is getting a little long even for me. That said I will return next time with some more tips of the trade and what ever else strikes my fancy. If you have specific questions - don't be shy, post a comment or send me an email.

Thanks for reading... you are a diehard to get through all of this.

Cheers,

Griz

How To Get Google Page Rank | BackLinks

To succeed online with any website or blog you need traffic. You can pay for traffic with programs like Google Adwords or you can optimize your pages in order to rank well in the SERP's or Search Engine Results Pages. If you have a page that converts traffic into paying customers then paying for traffic is a no brainer. If it costs me $10 to send 100 people to my site and 1 person in a hundred buys something that I sell for $20 then I make money - I'll pay for the traffic continuously.

If however, you don't convert traffic well enough to cover your costs then you need to get free traffic. (This should also be done even if you pay for traffic and make a profit - the more traffic the better.) To get free traffic from the search engines you have to do two things - optimize your pages for your keywords and then get enough decent backlinks to those pages in order to achieve a higher page rank than your competition. The higher your page rank - the higher Google will place you in the search results.

Simple... Right?

Actually this can be but I know most of you are having trouble achieving this.

The problem lies in getting backlinks and moreover, getting the right backlinks.

Let me illustrate a few examples of backlinks;

Two-Way Backlinks

This is when two websites swap links with each other. This should be avoided as these types of links dilute the link juice. You only want one way links to your site or blog. Period!

One-way Backlinks

A one way backlink is just that - another site posts a link pointing to your site. This type of link tells the search engines that your page is important because somebody else thinks enough of your site to send traffic to you.

Some one-way links are better than others and some should be avoided altogether.

If you join a link exchange of some type you will find that your link is added onto a page with hundreds or thousands of other links. This is a link farm and it is not good. Google will ignore the link at best or penalize you for it at worst. Stay away from this type of linking.

You can submit your site to any number of directories for free and wait and see if they add your link. This does work but it is time consuming and you aren't guaranteed to be added. A lot of the directories will insist that you add a link back to them and this then becomes a two-way link and remember rule number 1 - no two-way links.

You can join forums and make lots of posts and leave your link either in your signature or in the post. This works and allows you to optimize your anchor text in your link. Anchor text simply means the keyword you use in your link.

A Word about Anchor Text

If you want Google to index you high for relevant terms for your site then you have to make sure your backlinks use the right keywords in them.

Let's say I write an article and post it on GoArticles.

The article will be about "Making Money Online for Beginners".

If I write the article properly it will contain all my main keywords for this blog.

This will tell Google that my article is highly relevant for people searching for info regarding "Making Money Online" and this highly relevant article will have a link in it that points directly to my blog. A perfect backlink! Well not necessarily.

At the bottom of my article is a Bio Box that lets me add my blog url.

How you do this is very important.

If I write a bio that says:

"For more info please visit my blog "here"."

then I will get my backlink but I will have told Google to rank me high for people searching for the keyword "here".

If I had written my Bio this way:

"For more info please visit my blog "Make Money Online for Beginners"."

then I will get my backlink but this time the backlink will tell Google that I should be indexed for the term "Make Money Online".

I'm pretty sure that I will do better with visitors who are looking for ways to make money online than from visitors who are looking for "Here"

This is why your anchor text is so important. In a perfect world you want every single one-way backlink that you get to use keywords that optimize your pages for the terms you want to get indexed highest for.

The more your backlinks use a particular keyword the higher you will get indexed for that keyword.

A mistake most of you make is to use your sites name in most of your backlinks. This is fine if, like me, your sites' name contains your main keyword. Mine does so having some one put a link to me on their blog's side panel that says my name: "Make Money Online for Beginners" works. I will get indexed for people using the "make money online" keyword.

If your blog is named "Grizzly's Blog" and someone puts a link to you on their site using your name - guess what? You will get the backlink but only people searching for "Grizzly's Blog" will ever find you. This will suck if you wanted people who are looking for ways to make money online. Of course it would be fine if your site was about Bears.

But Grizzly I don't control what type of link someone else uses on their site when they give me a link.

In a lot of cases you don't. This is why you should always pick a name for your site that includes your main keyword. Most people will just link to you using your site's name.

Someone who likes your blog will do this;

Check out "Grizzly's Blog" for info on anchor text.

You would rather they do this;

If you are interested in "Anchor Text" then visit Grizzly's Blog.

The difference to your searchable listings on the SERP's will be huge if your backlinks are anchored properly.

You can always email your benefactor and ask that they change the link. Provide them with the anchor text that you would like them to use. Most people will agree to help you but asking always brings up the likely hood of them asking you for a backlink as well. Aaaarg... the dreaded two-way link and how do you say no without being a total jerk? Offer them a link from a different site than the one they linked to. Explain the value of one-way links to them if need be.

The Ideal Perfect and Bestest BackLink of All.

Ok, there is such a thing as a perfect backlink.

Here is the scenario and I might add that this is the easiest way to get backlinks of all and the fact that it happens to be the perfect backlink is just gravy. Everyone of you can get these.

Let's go back to my article about "making money online".

Articles allow you to control every detail of your backlink. I mentioned the BIO box earlier but this is not really where I focus my backlinks. I use the first paragraph in every article I write.

The best backlink you can get from Googles' point of view is a link contained in a sentence which is part of a larger block of text.

The absolute best backlink I could get for this blog is the following;

A Page Rank 10 site with a .edu extension with a name that contains "Make Money Online" in it, writes a post about making money online and adds a link to my site in the middle of a sentence using "make money online" as the anchor text pointing to my site. Kaaaaaa-Ching! My site would be on top of the SERP's faster than John Chow.com could get out of the way. I'd be number 2 right behind the PR10 site that gave me the link.

You use articles to make your perfectly optimized anchor text available for others to post on their sites. You control the anchor text regardless of who posts your article.

In my articles I always add a backlink in the first sentence of the first paragraph.


Ok, I said this is the perfect backlink and it is - unfortunately you can't fix it so only high PR sites post your articles - they belong to everyone and luck comes in when you get posted on a site with higher PR than you and it does happen. The point is that by using articles you get your backlinks out there and you would be surprised at how quickly they start adding up. I have written roughly 2 dozen articles for this blog and have over 700 backlinks at the moment. The vast majority are crappy but I have 20 good backlinks ranging from PR1 to PR7 at the moment. I didn't pay for any of them and never asked for any of them. They are all natural links that have popped up over the last six months as a result of my articles. The best part is that they all use my optimized anchor text.

Before I leave I want to mention a little network I just joined and am presently trying out. Before I go any farther this program costs $67 a month and I am not trying to sell you on it. If you are a beginner and only have 1 or 2 sites or blogs then you don't need this. I will help you for free but let me explain what this program is before I explain what I can do for you.

In short two fellows have created a small network of 103 blogs at present. These blogs are hosted on 60 different servers and as a result have 60 IP addresses which means that they avoid the link farm penalty. (If you have 100 blogs all on one server and link to each other you will be penalized as a link farm - ie. all the blogs are likely owned by just one person and the backlinks aren't really natural.)

The 103 blogs all have PR between 1 and 4 and the program is as follows. They are taking 300 members at $67 amonth. Each member will get access to all the blogs to post article snippets on. Each snippet will allow you to include a link to your blog using the anchor text you choose.

In a nutshell this program will allow you to get your backlinks on 103 blogs (Currently) that have PR between 1 and 4. If you have several blogs or sites then I suggest you join for at least one month. Your posts will never be removed so you can get all your links up in one month and then quit if you want. The monthly fee is because the creators are adding new blogs all the time and if you want access to the new ones you will have to keep your membership. $67 for 103 backlinks from PR sites is cheap.

If you only have one or two sites then send me an email and I will post your backlinks for you using my membership. You will have to send me a snippet from an article you write (no plagiarism) and tell me what keywords you want anchored in the snippet. I will post it on the highest PR blog that is most relevant to your topic. If you want it on all 103 blogs then join up you cheapskate. I will get you your first backlink just to show you whether this works or not.

For those of you that don't know how to tell what the page rank or alexa rank (traffic rank) of a site is you need to download the Google PageRank Toolbar and the Alexa Toolbar and add them to your browser.

For Internet Explorer users go here;

Google Page Rank Toolbar

Alexa Toolbar

For Firefox or Mozzilla users go here;

Quirk - Both Toolbars in One

The Toolbars are free.

For those of you who want to join up you can send me an email and I will give you the link. This is not a Clickbank product so you will need to use my link to join. They are only accepting 300 members but as of this morning there were only 33 members on the private forum so I suspect you have a little time before making a decision. I suggest letting me test this for you first before you sign up.

Ok... that's enough for today.

Talk soon,

Grizzly

The Rich Jerk Scam

And the Losers are...

Time for a little venting. For every decent program I find I have dumped a pile of cash into dozens of dogs first. I have no one to blame but myself as I confess I just can't resist finding out what all these schemes are about.

The Rich Jerk

Most of you are familiar with this fellow and his organization. A few years ago he wrote an eBook that sold several million units online. (for $50 you can learn how to buy PPC traffic on the cheap search engines and send them to spam sites full of high paying adsense ads [doesn't work anymore if it ever did]... oh and you get the list of high paying keywords that everyone and their dog knows about, you know "Loan Consolidation" "Lemon Laws" "Cancer Lawyers" etc. Just try and set up a site using these keywords, if you are a blog you will be flagged as a spammer and websites won't ever get indexed) This vaulted him into Guru status and everyone that purchased the book has been getting spammed by him ever since. This guy really makes me puke. While his methods might have worked back then, they don't now so stay clear. He is currently trying his hand in the "excessively overpriced mentoring scam" - join his own personal team of "experts" and get rich. Whatever.

A little story..

A few months ago I responded to one of his come ons to join his "exclusive hand picked club". I was asked to fill out a form which would weed out the wannabes from the cream. Psych 101 stuff like "Why should the Rich Jerk let you into his inner circle". I filled in a bunch of sarcastic answers that should have ended things but guess what. In spite of my wit and sarcasm I got a phone call from a fellow in Las Vegas who works for the Rich Jerk and was told that I might have what it takes to be offered a spot in the exclusive "Inner Circle".

Golly gee, really, little ol' me? I was assured that I had made it this far out of thousands of people trying to get into the club. I just needed to answer a few more questions for them to be sure they had the right man. "Sorry" I said. "Call back tomorrow, I'm busy at the moment".

With so many people desperate to get in I figured that was the last I would hear from them.

They called back the next day... "Just a few more questions..." they said.

"Call back again" I said. "Still too busy"

They did. 3 more times actually before I said I had time to talk.

We talked for about an hour. They're dime. They asked all sorts of asinine questions about my goals, was I a Leader? Yes, self motivated? Yes, could I follow instructions? No, I'm a leader remember - I give instructions. Ha ha he laughed.

"How much money would you like to be making 3 months from now? 6 months from now? 1 year from now." he asked. "Millions, more millions and let's say an even BILLION for 1 year out." I said.

He paused. "Really - you don't think that's asking a bit much?"

Nope.

"What do you do for a living in the real world?" he asked.

"I own a fishing lodge in Canada"

"Do you make a good living?" he asked.

"A few million a year" I lied.

Another pause. "Um... why are you interested in making money online then?"

"I want something to do in the winter." I said.

"Oh, I see." he said, "Well I think you are an excellent candidate for a position in our group, just one last thing. We haven't figured out a price for admission yet but it will be somewhere between 2 and 6 thousand dollars. I assume you can afford it"

"Would you like cash, check or credit card?" I asked.

"Hold on" he said, "I have to talk to my manager and see if he will extend you an invite"

What? Was I buying a car? The old salesman pleading the customers' case to his hard nosed manager shtick. Gee... I wonder if I'll be accepted?

A few minutes later. "Well I think I convinced him to take you on, he said he will call you tomorrow. Is there a good time for you?"

"Before 6am is best" I said. "I'm a busy man and I like to get up early."

"Would 10am work?" he asked.

"He can try, I might be busy" I said.

I got the call at about 10:15. I was busy. (not really) "Phone back."

He did - 2 more times (in spite of all the eager thousands waiting to join) until I said I could talk.

"We would like to extend an invitation to join our mentoring program." said the manager.

"How much?" I was blunt.

"$4800.00" he said. "I can take your credit card info over the phone.

"Tell me something" I asked. "I got one of those "Free" Rich Jerk Websites and have asked for a few explanations regarding it. How come I had to pay $100 for hosting it on your server instead of using my server? How come I can't put my adsense ads on it? How come I can't put a stats counter on it to track my visitors? How do I know if someone bought anything - the stats you give me don't match the amount of hits that Google has charged me for adwords. Google tells me that 100 people have been to the site and your stats say that only 9 people have been there. How do I know you didn't sell 91 ebooks and haven't given me my commission? Why don't you use an independent third party like paypal? How come no one has bothered to answer my questions?"

"Um... those sites are with a different department" said the manager."About the $4800.00, how would you like to pay?"

"Tell you what," said I "Look into my questions and get back to me and then we can talk about the $4800.00."

"Um... Ok" The manager hung up but said he would get back to me shortly.

2 days later he phoned back. "We haven't received your payment yet." he said.

"You were supposed to get back to me regarding questions I had concerning the "Free" Rich Jerk website" I said.

"What questions?" he asked.

I repeated my list. "That's a different department" he said.

"Well, if you want my $4800.00 you had better introduce yourself to that department and get back to me with my answers" I said.

"OK" said he.

The next day he called back again. "Are you going to send us the $4800.00?" he asked.

Nope. Goodbye.

And that's the type of people you will be dealing with if you get into the Rich Jerk schemes. His latest push is for something called Pipeline Profits. Avoid it at all costs.

Oh, this wasn't an entire bust as I figure between the phone calls and the employees wages I must have cost them the $100 they took from me. Not that I'm a spiteful bastard...

Moving on.

Blogging to the Bank

This is run by a fellow in the UK by the name of Rob Benwell. I forget the price but it was for too much anyway. This is the typical ebook that you buy and find out that it's yet another regurgitation of stuff you already know. It's not a scam just more of the same old info you have read before. Basically stuff that is easily found for free on the net.

If you buy anything from him you will be spammed with a lot of emails for all sorts of spamming software he pushes that will "Guarantee" you top listings in the SERP's (search engine result pages). This is the kind of software that is responsible for all "validation" boxes that you see nowadays. You know the "Type the image above" box you have to fill out to sign up or join anything.

This fellow is a firm believer in the automated spamming method to making money... or at least a firm believer in selling the programs that do the spamming to people who don't know any better.

To his credit his method of creating blogs (real content blogs and not the spam blogs) is actually quite successful (I've tested it on several blogs) at getting indexed fast - real fast actually. I've mentioned before that this Blog got indexed in 3 days on Google using most of the methods he suggests. I knew most of these methods already but he did give me a couple of new pointers. Regardless I still wouldn't recommend his eBook just because of a few novel points. Normaly this would be a good ebook for beginners but I think they may get led down the wrong path by his other interests in the spamosphere.

I recommend - Save your Money.

That's it for now,

Cheers,

Griz