Make money from your website

For millions of people web sites are the major source of income. Thanks to the various ways to monetize a site, it is possible to make a living as a web master. However, this doesn't mean that every web master is a millionaire. Well, if you know how to monetize your web site, you might not get rich but at least chances are that under the worst possible scenario, you will be able to cover your hosting fees and the other expenses you make for your site.

Currently the most profitable ways to monetize your site are CPM ads, CPC ads, CPA ads, direct sales of ad space, and selling merchandise/goods/services. These ways are described in this article.

CPM Ads Can Bring In Cents

CPM ads (an abbreviation for Cost Per Thousand) is the oldest type of site monetization. You put banners on your site and advertisers pay you based on the number of unique impressions/page views your site has.

CPM ads are the easiest form of site monetization because they require almost no effort on your side, but they are also the least feasible because as a rule (unless you have really high traffic and your audience is well-targeted), the rates are low. Some CPM ad networks pay as low as $.05 per 1,000 uniques, which means that you need millions of visitors in order to make $100-200 a month.

Popups and layer ads pay a bit more ($.5-2 per 1,000 uniques/pageviews). They could bring you a few dollars a month but many visitors find them especially irritating and this is why many web masters are not willing to put popups and/or layer ads on their sites.

There are high-paying CPM ads – for instance ads paying $2-5 per 1,000 uniques but usually the networks that run them have very high traffic and quality requirements for the sites that are eligible. As a result, it is very hard to get into these networks and take advantage of these well-paid CPM ads.

There are many CPM networks we can recommend. For sites with lots of traffic the choice better and some of the good options are Advertising.com, TribalFusion, CasaleMedia, and ValueClick because there CPM rates are good. AdBrite, AdToll, Right Media, and BurstMedia are also good. Some of these networks are CPM-only, while others have other types of ads as well. Google also has CPM ads, so you may want to try them.

CPC Ads Are a Profitable Way to Monetize a Site

CPC ads (an abbreviation from Cost Per Click) are different from CPM because with CPC you get paid not when visitors view ads but when they click on them. The good news is that CPC rates are much, much better and as a result, it is possible to make a decent income even with a small site with not so high traffic. The key with CPC success is to have a well-targeted site in a niche where there are a lot of advertisers.

The most popular CPC network is Google Adsense and even though there are other CPC networks, the income you can make from Adsense is much higher. The reason is that Google Adsense has many advertisers and if your site is in a profitable niche, CPC can be the best way to monetize your site. Additionally, unlike some of the other CPC ad networks, Google Adsense is open to publishers from all over the world.

Usually CPC ads are text ads and you publish them in blocks. However, there are also intext ads, where the keyword is underlined and when the visitor puts the mouse on it, a tooltip with CPC ads appears. Intext ads are less obtrusive but it takes much more effort for the user to notice them (and above all – to click them), which means that your chances to make money are further decreased. Kontera is one of the most popular networks for intext CPC ads.

The list of good CPC ad networks is not as long as the list of CPM or CPA ad networks but still there is a choice. For instance, Google Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN), BidVertiser, Chitika, and Clicksor are generally considered top choices but since many CPM ad networks pay decent rates for clicks on their CPM ads, you might want to try them as well.

CPA Ads Could Make You Rich

Currently CPA (an abbreviation from Cost Per Action) is the most profitable way to monetize a site in a profitable niche. CPA, also known as “affiliate programs”, pays you a commission when your visitors perform an action. Most often this action is a purchase, but it could also be something else – i.e. download a free trial, or signup for the service of the advertiser.

Affiliate programs can make you rich because there are many products with really fat commissions. For niches such as health, finance, travel, etc. affiliate programs are a real golden mine.

However, affiliate programs require a lot of efforts on your side and still there is no guarantee that the offers you pick to promote will convert well and will make you money. Sometimes even the highest converting offers won't convert on your site and the only thing you can do is replace them with other offers, hoping that they will convert better.

There might be hundreds of CPM ad networks but for CPA they are thousands. It is practically impossible to try all of them personally and this is why we would like to recommend some of the best to start with. Amazon, eBay, ShareASale, Commission Junction, Clickbank, Max Bounty, Azoogle, Never Blue Ads, LinkShare, or PepperJam are just a few of the greatest CPA networks we can recommend.

Direct Sales of Ads

If you are not happy with the CPM rates of ad networks, or CPC and CPA don't convert well with your site, you could try to find direct advertisers. However, have in mind that such an endeavor is not necessarily bound to succeed and if your site doesn't have audience advertisers can't reach elsewhere, you will hardly be able to negotiate good prices. Still, for some sites direct sales of ad space are a viable alternative and this is why you could also try it.

Openads Ad Server and OIO Publisher Ad Platform are two of the sites where you could try your luck. AdBrite also allowa you to price your ad space. In fact, almost any major network gives you the chance to put a widget on your site to invite advertisers directly to advertise on your site.

Sell Merchandise/Goods/Services

In addition to CPA ads, where you are selling other merchants' products, you can try selling your own merchandise or products/services with your brand. This technique works well mainly for popular sites with loyal audience and is hardly the easiest way to monetize a site. You could try to sell merchandise/goods/services as a supplementary service and if you see that this monetization technique works, you can expand the business. CafePress is one of the best places where you can sell merchandise with your logo and the greatest thing is that they print on demand, which means you don't have to keep your merchandise in stock.

The monetization techniques we described here can be combined. You can run CPM ads together with CPA or CPC. You can also combine multiple ads from the same type (i.e. CPM, CPC, or CPA) from different ad networks, provided that this doesn't violate the terms of these networks. There isn't a universal prescription about the best way to monetize a site. The basic rule is that you need to try and see what works for you. The fact that a given monetization technique works for somebody else doesn't mean that it will work for you, so you need to try and see for yourself.

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YouTube Traffic

YouTube is one of the most popular sites and in addition to all the fun there, YouTube offers many opportunities for promotion and getting traffic to your site. Similarly to Facebook and Twitter, in order to use YouTube successfully for promotion and getting traffic, you need to know the rules for this. Here are some tips how to promote yourself, your site, and your products and how to get free traffic from YouTube:

1 Post viral videos

There are millions of videos on YouTube. If you post a video nobody is interested in, this video will go unnoticed, as millions of other videos. The clue to getting traffic from YouTube is to post useful videos, or even better – viral videos. Viral videos are not only useful videos, but they also tend to appeal to large groups of people. If your video manages to get viral, people will promote it for you and the only thing left for you is to reap the benefits.

2 Create an interesting profile

Similarly to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site, an interesting profile is a must. If people like your videos, they will check your profile to learn more about you. When they see that your profile is boring, they won't bother more with you. You can make your profile a bit informal but don't make it as if it were the profile of a crazy teenager – you are using YouTube for business, right?

3 Include your logo and website in the video

Your logo and your website URL are your major branding weapons. This is why you must include them in the video. You can include them in the beginning of the video or at the end. It is best to have your logo and URL throughout the whole video because this way you will be gaining lots of exposure but if you can't do it (for instance because of artistic considerations), the beginning and the end of the video will suffice.

4 Post quality videos

As already mentioned, there is no shortage of videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, this also means there is no shortage of videos with poor quality. These videos are not favored by viewers, so if you want viewers to watch your videos, make sure that your videos don't have crappy sound and/or blurred pictures. YouTube is not a board for professional videographers, so you can post amateur videos, but make sure their quality is decent.

5 Promote your videos

If your videos get viral, you are lucky but you can't count on this. In order to get YouTube traffic, your videos need viewers. You can't rely solely on the fact that viewers will find your videos – you need to promote them. Even viral videos will benefit from a promotion by you.

6 Make your videos search-friendly

One of the ways viewers find your videos is through search – both locally on YouTube and on search engines. This is why you need to make your videos search-friendly. To do this, include your major keywords in the title and in the descriptions. Also, pay special attention to the tags. List as many keywords as relevant in the tags, but beware that you don't get spammy.

7 Post in series

Standalone videos can become a hit but it is best if you create series of videos and post them once a day/week. This way viewers will know that there will be more and they will be coming to check. Even if you don't create series, at least try to post videos regularly – this builds audience loyalty.

8 Post video responses

Video responses are one of the unique things about YouTube and you should take full advantage of it. Search your niche, choose the most popular videos in your niche and post video responses to them. Just be careful that the response you post is related to the video you are responding to and don't make your video response a blatant self-promotion.

9 Choose the right time to post your videos

On YouTube, timing is very important because there are peaks in traffic and times when there are not so many viewers. Weekdays (especially Wednesdays and above all - Thursdays) morning or early afternoon US time is the best time to post a general interest video. In order to have your video uploaded in the prime time, you need to plan a bit. Have in mind that for large videos and/or slow Internet connections the upload could take you an hour, so start early.

10 Keep your videos short

YouTube doesn't impose limits on the length of videos it publishes but generally long videos are boring. 3 to 5 minutes is the best duration for a video but if required you could go from 1 to 6 minutes. When a video is longer than 6 or 7 minutes, this gets boring and not many people will watch it to the end (where your logo and URL are to be found). 3 to 5 minutes is enough to lay your idea, give some details AND tell viewers to visit your site for more.

11 Comment on other people's videos and include a link to your site in your comment

In addition to video responses, you can also use plain good comments. Again, search for popular videos in your niche and comment on them. If your comments are liked by viewers, they will check your profile and probably watch your videos.

YouTube is a valuable resource to drive traffic to your site and to promote it. The competition there might be fierce, but there is always room for a couple of good videos. Fill this room before your competitors do!

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How to Boost your SEO with Google Adwords

Many advertisers use Google AdWords as their major PPC network. However, in addition to using AdWords for getting paid traffic to your site, it can also be used for SEO. Here are some ideas how you can use AdWords for SEO.

1 For Keyword Research

The most valuable use of AdWords for SEO is to research keywords. Keywords are the basis of any SEO campaign and even if you are an expert in your niche, you should always research keywords simply because users frequently search for quite unexpected keywords and keyphrases you as an expert will never think of. Needless to say, what matters most for high rankings is which keywords your target audience is searching for, not which keywords you as an expert think are most popular in a particular niche.

In order to find what users are searching for, you need a keyword research tool. It is true that there are many special (free and paid) keyword research tools but Google AdWords Keyword Tool is light years ahead of them all.

It is simple to use AdWords to research keywords. You can either enter the URL of your site or put in some seed keywords, the tool will then automatically generate a whole bunch of suggested keywords. Look at the results and shortlist all the keywords that seem relevent and have a decent global search volume.

You may want to rank well for ALL the generated keywords, but its best to focus all your efforts on a selected few. The idea now is to find keywords that are relatively easy to optimize and yet have a decent search volume. These would be the keywords with the least compitetion in Google. Go to Google.com and enter each of your short listed keywords (one at a time). It is best if you search for the exact phrase, so surround your keyword with double quotes. Note how many web results there are for each of the phrases. Now that you have collected the 'Number of web results' for each keyword, calculate competition ratio by divding it's 'Global search volume' by the 'Number of web results'. The keywords with the higher ratios are the easier ones to optimize.

You can now start a SEO campaign for your keywords however you'll see next, it might be much wiser to start an AdWords campaign instead.

2 To Ensure that the Keywords You Have Picked Convert Well

After you have picked your keywords, you need to verify if these keywords really work for you – i.e. if they convert properly. No matter how precise you've been when picking your keywords, if you don't test them in practice, you can never know for sure if they work well or don't. You can pick lucrative keywords with high global search volume and low levels of competition and still end nowhere.

For instance, for this website - webconfs.com we could try optimizing for the keyword "Search Engine Optimization". It could take a year or so with a LOT of effort to reach the first page on Google for "Search Engine Optimization” and still one can never be sure this will happen.

However, let's pretend that this happens – We manage to top Google for "Search Engine Optimization” after a year of hard SEO work. To our greatest disappointment, even the first place for "Search Engine Optimization” on Google did'nt bring the expected results because the bounce rate for this particular keyword turned out to be very high. Since we do not provide SEO Services a lot of people reaching us via "Search Engine Optimization" may NOT be getting what they're looking for. Instead, lesser popular keywords, such as "SEO Tips” or "SEO Guide” might have lower bounce rates and may actually perform better than "Search Engine Optimization” did for us.

The result is not surprising but the price paid is. If we had launched an AdWords campaign, it would have saved a lot of trouble. We could have spent $20-50 on AdWords for "Search Engine Optimization” and it would have taken us a week or less to figure that the bounce rate for this keyword is very high and it makes no sense to do organic SEO for it. These $20-50 on AdWords would have spared a year of wasted SEO efforts.

3 For Getting a Better CTR with Your Existing Rankings

In addition to keyword research, AdWords is a valuable tool for getting a better CTR (Click Thru Rate) with your existing rankings. You might rank well for a given keyword, get a lot of traffic, and still be unable to monetize this traffic because your CTR is low. The reasons for this might be various but inadequate title and description could be a very possible reason.

AdWords can also help you get better CTR with your existing rankings. For instance, if you run ad AdWords campaign and you are satisfied with the conversion/performance, you might want to keep changing your ad title and description until you feel you have reached the maximum CTR for your keywords.

Sure, it might take you a couple of tries till you find the winning combination of a title and a description and you might even lower your CTR in the process but once you find this magical combination of a title and description, just copy them as the title and description for your page in order to maximize your organic search CTR as well.

4 For Geographic Targeting

One more good use of AdWords for SEO is geotargeting. If you bid on traffic from many geographic locations, you can use Google Analytics to compare how different locations convert. It is quite natural to have significant discrepancies in the conversions for the same keyword among the countries.

When you go to Google Analytics and see which countries are converting best, you can invest more effort in them. For instance, you can create local pages for these countries or target the geo-specific keywords with exceptionally good conversion rates.

AdWords is a really valuable tool not only for advertisers. It started as a tool for advertisers but its use is not restricted to them alone. For many publishers and SEO experts AdWords is the most valuable tool because even a moderate AdWords campaign can give you valuable insights and save you a lot of time and money to optimize for words, which don't work for you.

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How to Pick an SEO Friendly Designer

A Web designer is one of the persons without whom it is not possible to create a site. However, when SEO is concerned, Web designers can be really painful to deal with. While there are many Web designers, who are SEO-proficient, it is still not an exception to stumble upon design geniuses, who are focused only on the graphic aspect of the site. For them SEO is none of their business and they couldn't care less for something as unimportant as good rankings with search engines. Needless to say, if you hire such a designer, don't expect that your site will rank well with search engines.

If you will do SEO on your own, then you might not care a lot about the SEO skills of your Web designer but still there are design issues as we'll see next, which can affect your rankings very badly. When he or she designs the site against SEO rules, then it is not possible to fix this with SEO tricks.

When we say that you need to hire a SEO-friendly designer, we presume that you are a SEO pro and you know SEO but if you aren't, then have a look at the SEO Tutorial and the SEO Checklist. If you have no idea about SEO, then you will hardly be able to select a SEO-friendly designer because you won't know what to look for.

One of the ultimate tests if a designer is SEO-friendly or not is to look at his or her past sites – are they done professionally, especially in the SEO department. If their past sites don't exhibit blatant SEO mistakes, such as the ones we'll list in a second and they rank well, this is a recommendation that this person is worth hiring. Anyway, after you look at past sites, ask the designer if he or she did the SEO for their past sites because in some cases it might be that the client himself or herself has done a lot to optimize the site and this is why the site ranks well.

Here is a checklist of common web design sins that will make your site a SEO disaster. If you notice any or all of the following in the past sites your would-be designer has created, just move to the next designer. These SEO-unfriendly design elements are absolute sins and unless the client made them do it, no designer who would use the below techniques deserves your attention:

1 Rely heavily on Flash

Many designers still believe that Flash is the next best thing after sliced bread. While Flash can be very artistic and make a site look cool (and load forever in the browser), heavily Flash-ed sites are disaster in terms of SEO. Simple HTML sites rank better with search engines and as we point out in Optimizing Flash Sites, if the use of Flash is a must, then an HTML version of the same page is more than mandatory.

2 No internal links, or very few links

Internal links are backlinks and they are very important. Of course, this doesn't mean that all the text on a page must be hyperlinked to all the other pages on the site but if there are only a couple of internal links a page, this is a missed chance to get backlinks.

3 Images, not text for anchors

This is another frequent mistake many designers make. Anchor text is vital in SEO and when your links lack anchor text, this is bad. It is true that for menu items and other page elements, it is much easier to use an image than text because with text you can never be sure it will display correctly on users' screens, but since this is impacting your site's rankings in a negative way, you should sacrifice beauty for functionality.

4 Messy code and tons of code

If you have no idea about HTML, then it might be impossible for you to judge if a site's code is messy and if the amount of code is excessive but cleanness of code is an important criterion for SEO. When the code is messy, it might not be spiderable at all and this can literally exclude your site from search engines because they won't be able to index it.

5 Excessive use of (SEO non-friendly) JavaScript

Similarly to Flash, search engines don't love JavaScript, especially tons of it. Actually, the worst with JavaScript is that if not coded properly, it is quite possible that because of the use of JavaScript your pages (or parts of them) are not spiderable, which automatically means that they won't be indexed.

6 Overoptimized sites

Overoptimized sites aren't better than under-optimized. In fact, they could be much worse because when you keyword stuff and use other techniques (even when they are not Black Hat SEO) to artificially inflate the rankings of the site, this could get you banned from search engines and this is the worst that can happen to a site.

7 Dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs

Well, maybe dynamic URLs is not exactly a design issue but if you are getting a turn-key site - i.e. it is not up to you to upload and configure it and to create the links inside - then dynamic URLs are bad and you have to ask the designer/developer not to use them. You can rewrite dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs on your own but actually this means to make dramatic changes to the site and this is hardly the point of hiring a designer.

These points are very important and this is why you need to follow them, when you are choosing a SEO-friendly designer. Some of the items on the list are so bad for SEO (i.e. Flash, JavaScript) that even if the site is a design masterpiece and you promote it heavily, you will still be unable to get decent rankings. SEO-friendliness of design is a necessity, not a whim and you shouldn't settle for a SEO-unfriendly designs – this can be really expensive!

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How to Optimize your Website for Mobile Search

It is not only web designers and developers, who need to adapt to webcomake changes to their strategies and tactics, if they want to capture the lucrative mobile search market. Mobile search is a constantly growing segment of the market, which is good news. However, mobile search has its own rules and they are kind of different from the rules of traditional desktop search. This is why if you don't want to miss mobile searchers, you need to adapt to their requirements. Here are some very important rules to consider when optimizing for mobile search:

1 Mobile Searchers Use Shorter Keyphrases/Keywords

Mobile users search for shorter keyphrases, or even just for keywords. Even mobile devices with QWERTY keyboards are awkward for typing long texts and this is the reason why mobile searchers usually are very brief in their search queries. Very often the search query is limited to only 2 or even 1 words. As a result, if you don't rank well for shorter keyphrases (unfortunately, they are also more competitive), then you will be missing a lot of mobile traffic.

2 Mobile Search Is Mainly Local Search

Mobile users search mostly for local stuff. In addition to shorter search keyphrases, mobile searchers are also locally targeted. It is easy to understand - when a user is standing in the street and is looking for a place to dine, he or she is most likely looking for things in the neighborhood, not in another corner of the world. Searches like “pizza 5th Avenue” are quite popular, which makes local search results even more important to concentrate on.

3 Current Data Rules in Mobile Search

Sports results, news, weather, financial information are among the most popular mobile search categories. The main topics and niches mobile users prefer are kind of limited but again, they revolve around places to eat or shop in the area, sports results, news, weather conditions, market information, and other similar topics where timing and location are key. If your site is in one of these niches, then you really need to optimize it because if your site is not mobile-friendly chances are you are losing visitors. You could even consider having two separate versions of your site – one for desktop searchers and one for mobile searchers.

4 In Mobile Search, Top 10 Is Actually Top 3

Users hate to scroll down long search pages or hit Next, Next, Next. Desktop searchers aren't fond of scrolling endless pages either but in mobile search the limitations are even more severe. A page with 10 search results fits on the screen of a desktop but on a mobile device it might be split into 2 or more screens. Therefore, in mobile search, it is not Top 10, it is more Top 4, or even Top 3 because only the first 3 or 4 positions are on the first page and have a higher chance to attract the user's attention without having to go to the next page.

5 Promote Your Mobile-Friendly Site

Submit your site to major mobile search engines, mobile portals, and directories. It is great if your visitors come from Google and the other major search engines but if you want to get even more traffic, mobile search engines, mobile portals, and directories are even better. For now these mobile resources work great to bring mobile traffic, so don't neglect them. Very often a mobile user doesn't search with Google, but goes to a portal he or she knows. If your site is listed with this portal, the user will come directly to you from there, not from a search engine. The case with directories is similar – i.e. if you are optimizing the site of a pizza restaurant, then you should submit it to all directories where pizza restaurants and restaurants in general for your location are listed.

6 Follow Mobile Standards

Mobile search standards are kind of different and if you want your site to be spiderable, you need to comply with them. Check the guidelines of W3C to see what mobile standards are. Even if your site doesn't comply with mobile standards, it will still be listed in search results but it will be transcoded by the search engine and the result could be pretty shocking to see. Transcoders convert sites to a mobile format but this is not done in a sophisticated manner and the output might be really unbelievable – and everything but mobile-friendly.

7 Don't Forget Meta.txt

Meta.txt is a special file, where you briefly describe the contents of your site and point the user agent to the most appropriate version for it. Search engine spiders directly index the meta.txt file (provided it is located in the root directory), so even if the rest of your site is not accessible, you will still be included in search results. Meta.txt is similar to robots.txt in desktop search but it also has some similarity with metatags because you can put content it it (as you do with the Description and Keywords metatags). The format of the meta.txt file is colon delimited (as is the format of robots.txt). Each field in the file has the following syntax form :. One of the advantages of meta.txt is that it is easily parsed by humans and search engines.

8 No Long Pages for Mobile Searchers

Use shorter texts because mobile users don't have the time to read lengthy pages. We already mentioned that mobile searchers don't like lengthy keyphrases. Well, they like lengthy pages even less! This is why, if you can make a special, shorter mobile version of your site, this would be great. Short pages don't mean that you should skip your keywords, though. Keywords are really vital for mobile search, so don't exclude them but don't keyword stuff, either.

9 Predictive Search Is Popular With Mobile Searchers

Use phrases, which are common in predictive search. Predictive search is also popular with mobile searchers because it saves typing effort. This is why, if your keywords are among the common predictive search results, this seriously increases your chances to be found. It is true that predictive search keywords change from time to time and you can't always follow them but you should at least give it a try.

10 Preview Your Site on Mobile Devices

Always check how your site looks on a mobile device. With the plethora of devices and screen sizes it is not possible to check your site on absolutely every single device you can think of, but if you can check it at least on a couple of the most important ones, this is more than nothing. Even if you manage to get visitors from mobile search engines, if your site is shown distorted on a mobile screen, these visitors will run away. Transcoding is one reason why a site gets distorted, so it is really a good idea to make your site mobile-friendly instead of to rely on search engines to transcode it and make it a design nightmare in the process.

Mobile search is relatively new but it is a safe bet that it will get a huge boost in the near future. If you are uncertain whether your particular site deserves to be optimized for mobile devices or not, use AdWords Keyword Research Tool to track mobile volumes for your particular keywords. If the volumes are high, or if a particular keyword is doing remarkably well in the mobile search segment, invest more time and effort to optimize for it.

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SEO Musts for Local Business

The Internet might be global in nature, but if your business is local, it makes no sense to concentrate on global reach, when your customers live in your city, or even in your neighborhood. For local businesses getting a global reach is a waste of resources. Instead, you should concentrate on the local community. You might be asking how you can do it, when the Web is global and Google doesn't classify sites according to their location. Here is how you can go local with SEO:

1 Use your location in your keywords.

The first trick is to use your location in your keywords. For example, if you are in London and you sell car insurance, your most important keyphrase should be “car insurance London” because this keyphrase contains your business and your location and will drive people who are looking for car insurance in London in particular.

2 Use your location in metatags

Metatags matter for search engines and you shouldn't miss to include your location, together with your other keywords in the metatags of the pages of your site. Of course, you must have your location in the keywords you use in the body text because otherwise it is a bit suspicious when your body text doesn't have your location as a keyword but your tags are stuffed with it.

3 Use your location in your body text

Keywords in the body text count a lot and you can't afford to skip them. If your web copy is optimized for “car insurance” only, this won't help you rank well with “car insurance London”, so make sure that your location is part of your keywords.

4 Take advantage of Google Places and Yahoo Local

Google Places and Yahoo Local are great places to submit to because they will include you in their listings for a particular location.

5 Create backlinks with your location as anchor text

It could be a bit tricky to get organic backlinks with your location as anchor text because some keywords with location don't sound very natural – for instance, “car insurance London” isn't grammatically correct and you will hardly get an organic inline link with it but you can use it in the Name field to comment on blogs. If the blog is dofollow, you will still get a backlink with anchor text that helps for SEO.

6 Get included in local search engine

Global search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo can bring you lots of traffic but depending on your location, local search engines might be the real golden mine. A local search engine could mean a search engine for the area (though it is not very likely to have regional search engines) or more likely for your country. For instance, Baidu is a great option, if you are selling on the Chinese market.

7 Get listed in local directories

In addition to local search engines, you need to try your luck with local directories, too. You might think that nobody reads directory listings but this isn't exactly so. For instance, Yellow Pages are one of the first places where people look when searching for a local vendor for a particular product.

8 Run locally-targeted ad campaigns

One of the most efficient ways to drive targeted, local traffic to your site is with the help of locally-targeted ad campaigns. PPC ads and classifieds are the two options that work best – at least for most webmasters.

9 Do occasional checks of your keywords

Occasionally checking the current search volume of your keywords is a good idea because shifts in search volumes are quite typical. Needless to say, if people don't search for “car insurance London” anymore because they have started using other search phrases and you continue to optimize for “car insurance London”, this is a waste of time and money. Also, keep an eye on the keywords your competitors use – this will give you clue which keywords work and which don't.

10 Use social media

Social media can drive more traffic to a site than search engines and for local search this is also true. Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networking sites have a great sales potential because you can promote your business for free and reach exactly the people you need. Local groups on social sites are especially valuable because the participants there are mainly from the region you are interested in.

11 Ask for reviews and testimonials

Client reviews and testimonials are a classical business instrument and these are like letters of recommendation for your business. However, as far as SEO is concerned, they could have another role. There are review sites, where you can publish such reviews and testimonials (or ask your clients to do it) and this will drive business to you. Some of these sites are Yelp and Merchant Circle but it is quite probable that there are regional or national review sites you can also post at.

12 Create separate pages for your different locations

When you have business in several locations, this makes the task a bit more difficult because you can't possibly optimize for all of them – you can't have a keyphrase such as “car insurance London, Berlin, Paris, New York”. In this case the solution is to create separate pages for your different locations. If your locations span the globe, you can also create different sites on different, country-specific domains (i.e. uk.co for GB, .de for Germany, etc.) but this is only reasonable to do, if your business is truly multinational. Otherwise, just a separate page for each of your locations will do.

These simple tips how to optimize your site for local searches are a must, if you rely on the local market. Maybe you are already doing some of them and you know what works for you and what doesn't. Anyway, if you haven't tried them all, try them now and see if this will have a positive impact on your rankings (and your business) or not.

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How to Optimize for Baidu

Usually SEO efforts are directed towards achieving top rankings with Google and sometimes with Yahoo and Bing. However, in addition to the Big Three, there are also other search engines that might be of interest to you. In fact, some of these search engines might prove a better option than Google, Yahoo or Bing. If these search engines are used by your target audience, they will be more efficient and it is worth to spend some time optimizing for them.

If you haven't heard about Baidu, don't worry. It is a popular search engine but its reach is not global and this is why many people don't even know about it. Still, Baidu is certainly not just one more search engine to waste your time with. Baidu is big in China and since the population of China is more than a billion, if you rank well with Baidu, this can make quite a difference. In fact, if you are operating globally, not to mention if your visitors are based mainly in China, you can't afford to miss this market. On the Chinese market, the share of Baidu is around 60% and it is the most popular Chinese language search engine. Google is less popular in China than Baidu, so if your traffic comes from the Chinese market, it pays to optimize your site for Baidu.

The algorithm of Baidu is different from the algorithms of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. In a sense, it is less sophisticated and it kinda resembles the algorithms of the other search engines from many years many years ago. Here are some tips what you should do in order to get decent rankings with Baidu:

1 Find the right Chinese keywords

Of course, as with other search engines, keywords are important for good rankings. You need to find the right Chinese keywords to optimize for. This might be a challenge because Chinese has many dialects and the same words have different meanings in different dialects. However, Pinyin Chinese is preferred by Baidu and this is why Pinyin Chinese is your best choice. You should stick to it not only for your keywords but for your content as a whole.

2 You need LOTS of content in Chinese

Even if Chinese is not the official language of your site, you need to have many pages in Chinese. With Baidu, content is king – the same as with other search engines. When generating tons of content in Chinese, follow the official guidelines for what content is acceptable in China because there are strict rules there and if you don't obey, this could cost you not only your good rankings with Baidu.

3 Metatags weight a lot

Similarly to the early days of the other search engines, with Baidu metatags are very important, so don't forget to make your metatags top-notch. However, don't abuse metatags and don't stuff them with keywords.

4 Get a Pinyin Chinese domain name and host your site on a Chinese host

Domain names are important with Baidu as well. In addition to having keywords in your domain name, you need to have a domain name in Pinyin Chinese. You can use a .com, .net, or .cn extension with it. For even better results, host your site on a Chinese host because this gives you an additional bonus with Baidu.

5 Use simple navigation structures

Simple navigation structures are a must with every search engine but for Baidu they matter even more. Baidu won't follow links that are deeply buried in all kinds of messy code or that go many levels deep in the site hierarchy.

6 Watch for duplicate content

Baidu is very strict about duplicate content. With the other search engines you might also have problems, if you have duplicate content but Baidu is even less tolerant. Use a robots.txt to tell what not to index and you are safe.

7 No links to bad neighbors and no link farms

Linking to bad neighbors and getting links from link farms isn't a good idea with any search engine but penalties with Baidu are even more severe, so you need to consider this. Also, don't put too many outbound links on your site because this also affects your Baidu rankings in a negative way.

8 Plan in advance

In Google you can get top rankings for a week (though this certainly isn't the norm and we don't mean you should use blackhat strategies to achieve it) but with Baidu success doesn't come that fast. In Baidu it can take 6 months or more to achieve the good rankings you will achieve in Google overnight and you need to take this into account. For instance, if you are promoting a summer-related site, you should start optimization not later than November, so that when the season comes, your site will have achieved the rankings you want.

9 Baidu doesn't deal with Flash and JavaScript

Flash and JavaScript aren't Google's favorites but Baidu absolutely hates them. This is why you should use Flash and JavaScript only if you provide altenative HTML versions of the content you have incorporated in the Flash/JavaScript. Baidu doesn't like iFrames either, so avoid their use as well.

10 Make sure your site is spiderable

As any other search engine, Baidu uses crawlers, so make sure your site is spiderable. Use a spider simulator to check what is accessible from your site and what isn't.

As you see, optimization for Baidu isn't totally different from optimization for any other search engine but it certainly has its specifics. Follow the rules, be patient and sooner or later success will come to you. When you are done with your Baidu optimization, it won't be a surprise, if your site starts ranking better with Google as well, especially for country-specific searches. When you have so much content in Chinese and a Chinese domain name, this will inevitably help you to achieve better rankings for your Chinese search terms in any other search engine.

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SEO Basics And How it Works?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of using keywords to rank number one on Google or any other Search Engine Results Page.

It’s an internet marketing strategy that improves the visibility of your website, thus creating more traffic and inbound links to it.

Every network marketer out there should have an idea of what SEO is all about. What you may not know is how search engines actually work to pore through the millions of websites and filter out which are spam and which are not. Getting your website to rank number one on Google is huge achievement in terms of generating traffic and leads for your business, but first you need to understand how Google works to take advantage of it.

These days, having quality informative articles just won’t cut it anymore. Don’t get me wrong- having superior content on your website is a top priority too, but what use would your content have if no one gets to read it?

Sure, you may also make use of other traffic-generating strategies like link-baiting, affiliate marketing and commenting, but compared to SEO, these tools often take longer time to produce results.

When you optimize and hone your content keywords to rank high in any search engine results page, you get access to wide publicity that can happen, seemingly, by chance.

To rank websites, Google has bots and spiders that crawl all throughout the web to see what possible websites answer the search typed in. They crawl through literally millions of websites. These bots are text-driven. It doesn’t count the images and flash pictures that you put on. Once your website has been “crawled” through, the next step is to index your content. This is the step where your keywords are important.

With indexing, your entire content will be stored in a database where it can be later retrieved. The bot identifies certain words and assigns the page to a particular keyword. For us network marketers, the best way to rank high in Google is to optimize the content by writing the keyword densely in your content, but spread out so that it won’t be filtered as spam.

Every time someone types in a search, Google processes it and compares the search string with the indexed web pages in its database. This is where Google confirms each site’s relevancy. They use different algorithms to determine the most relevant page, and each Search Engine has its own algorithm that may change periodically. SEO experts regularly try to figure out this algorithm that comes with search results to get their clients to rank number one.

If your main objective is to rank number one, then I suggest using a variety of strategies to make it so. If you complement SEO with other tools like back linking, commenting on other people’s sites and promoting your site when possible and in the most legitimate way possible, then it’s highly possible that you will get first page rankings.

But of course, the main idea is to rank number one with the most quality content in your webpage. The more quality stuff you write and put out, the more consistent your site will be and the more people will link to it, hence creating a cycle of abundance for your business!

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List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website

Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist. Most of

the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to Bing, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance.

	Keywords
1	Keywords in	This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the	+3
2	Keywords in URL	Keywords in URLs help a lot - e.g. - http://domainname.com/seo-services.html, where “SEO services” is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But if you don't have the keywords in other parts of the document, don't rely on having them in the URL.	+3
3	Keyword density in document text	Another very important factor you need to check. 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10% is suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally written text.	+3
4	Keywords in anchor text	Also very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.	+3
5	Keywords in headings ( , , etc. tags)	One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.	+3
6	Keywords in the beginning of a document	Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph – for instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table.	+2
7	Keywords in tags	Spiders don't read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the tag with some keywords about them.	+2
8	Keywords in metatags	Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo! and Bing still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or Bing, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it.	+1
9	Keyword proximity	Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “dog food”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “dog” in the first paragraph and “food” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “dog food” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.	+1
10	Keyword phrases	In addition to keywords, you can optimize for keyword phrases that consist of several words – e.g. “SEO services”. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (“SEO” and “services”) than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.	+1
11	Secondary keywords	Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the minor words. For instance, “real estate new jersey” might have thousand times less hits than “real estate” only but if you are operating in New Jersey, you will get less but considerably better targeted traffic.	+1
12	Keyword stemming	For English this is not so much of a factor because words that stem from the same root (e.g. dog, dogs, doggy, etc.) are considered related and if you have “dog” on your page, you will get hits for “dogs” and “doggy” as well, but for other languages keywords stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the same root are considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of them.	+1
13	Synonyms	Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well, when ranking sites but for many other languages synonyms are not taken into account, when calculating rankings and relevancy.	+1
14	Keyword Mistypes	Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings (i.e. Christmas and Xmas), you might be tempted to optimize for them. Yes, this might get you some more traffic but having spelling mistakes on your site does not make a good impression, so you'd better don't do it, or do it only in the metatags.	0
15	Keyword dilution	When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.	-2
16	Keyword stuffing	Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.	-3
	Links - internal, inbound, outbound
17	Anchor text of inbound links	As discussed in the Keywords section, this is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don't, it is still OK.	+3
18	Origin of inbound links	Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable.	+3
19	Links from similar sites	Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.	+3
20	Links from .edu and .gov sites	These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info, etc. domains. Additionally, such links are hard to obtain.	+3
21	Number of backlinks	Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than their number. Also important is their anchor text, is there a keyword in it, how old are they, etc.	+3
22	Anchor text of internal links	This also matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links.	+2
23	Around-the-anchor text	The text that is immediately before and after the anchor text also matters because it further indicates the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link is artificial or it naturally flows in the text.	+2
24	Age of inbound links	The older, the better. Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them.	+2
25	Links from directories	Great, though it strongly depends on which directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and similar directories is a great boost for your ranking but having tons of links from PR0 directories is useless and it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of such links.	+2
26	Number of outgoing links on the page that links to you	The fewer, the better for you because this way your link looks more important.	+1
27	Named anchors	Named anchors (the target place of internal links) are useful for internal navigation but are also useful for SEO because you stress additionally that a particular page, paragraph or text is important. In the code, named anchors look like this: Read about dogs and “#dogs” is the named anchor.	+1
28	IP address of inbound link	Google denies that they discriminate against links that come from the same IP address or C class of addresses, so for Google the IP address can be considered neutral to the weight of inbound links. However, Bing and Yahoo! may discard links from the same IPs or IP classes, so it is always better to get links from different IPs.	+1
29	Inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites	This does not affect you in any way, provided that the links are not reciprocal. The idea is that it is beyond your control to define what a link farm links to, so you don't get penalized when such sites link to you because this is not your fault but in any case you'd better stay away from link farms and similar suspicious sites.	0
30	Many outgoing links	Google does not like pages that consists mainly of links, so you'd better keep them under 100 per page. Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of ranking and could even make your situation worse.	-1
31	Excessive linking, link spamming	It is bad for your rankings, when you have many links to/from the same sites (even if it is not a cross- linking scheme or links to bad neighbors) because it suggests link buying or at least spamming. In the best case only some of the links are taken into account for SEO rankings.	-1
32	Outbound links to link farms and other suspicious sites	Unlike inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites, outbound links to bad neighbors can drown you. You need periodically to check the status of the sites you link to because sometimes good sites become bad neighbors and vice versa.	-3
33	Cross-linking	Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A. This is the simplest example but more complex schemes are possible. Cross-linking looks like disguised reciprocal link trading and is penalized.	-3
34	Single pixel links	when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.	-3
	Metatags
35	metatag	Metatags are becoming less and less important but if there are metatags that still matter, these are the and ones. Use the metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that metatags still rock on Bing and Yahoo!, the metatag has one more advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your site in search results.	+1
36	metatag	The metatag also matters, though as all metatags it gets almost no attention from Google and some attention from Bing and Yahoo! Keep the metatag reasonably long – 10 to 20 keywords at most. Don't stuff the tag with keywords that you don't have on the page, this is bad for your rankings.	+1
37	metatag	If your site is language-specific, don't leave this tag empty. Search engines have more sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page than relying on the metatag but they still consider it.	+1
38	metatag	The metatag is one way to redirect visitors from your site to another. Only do it if you have recently migrated your site to a new domain and you need to temporarily redirect visitors. When used for a long time, the metatag is regarded as unethical practice and this can hurt your ratings. In any case, redirecting through 301 is much better.	-1
	Content
39	Unique content	Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site's rankings.	+3
40	Frequency of content change	Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.	+3
41	Keywords font size	When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text, this makes it more noticeable, so therefore it is more important than the rest of the text. The same applies to headings ( , , etc.), which generally are in larger font size than the rest of the text.	+2
42	Keywords formatting	Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic and larger font sizes within reason because otherwise you might achieve just the opposite effect.	+2
43	Age of document	Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored.	+2
44	File size	Generally long pages are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple smaller ones.	+1
45	Content separation	From a marketing point of view content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great but for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content, search engines get confused what the actual content of the page is.	-2
46	Poor coding and design	Search engines say that they do not want poorly designed and coded sites, though there are hardly sites that are banned because of messy code or ugly images but when the design and/or coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at all, so in this sense poor code and design can harm you a lot.	-2
47	Illegal Content	Using other people's copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.	-3
48	Invisible text	This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don't be surprised by the penalty.	-3
49	Cloaking	Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.	-3
50	Doorway pages	Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.	-3
51	Duplicate content	When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned – i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and prosper.	-3
	Visual Extras and SEO
52	JavaScript	If used wisely, it will not hurt. But if your main content is displayed through JavaScript, this makes it more difficult for spiders to follow and if JavaScript code is a mess and spiders can't follow it, this will definitely hurt your ratings.	0
53	Images in text	Having a text-only site is so boring but having many images and no text is a SEO sin. Always provide in the tag a meaningful description of an image but don't stuff it with keywords or irrelevant information.	0
54	Podcasts and videos	Podcasts and videos are becoming more and more popular but as with all non-textual goodies, search engines can't read them, so if you don't have the tapescript of the podcast or the video, it is as if the podcast or movie is not there because it will not be indexed by search engines.	0
55	Images instead of text links	Using images instead of text links is bad, especially when you don't fill in the tag. But even if you fill in the tag, it is not the same as having a bold, underlined, 16-pt. link, so use images for navigation only if this is really vital for the graphic layout of your site.	-1
56	Frames	Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.	-2
57	Flash	Spiders don't index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don't forget to give it an alternative textual description.	-2
58	A Flash home page	Fortunately this epidemic disease seems to have come to an end. Having a Flash home page (and sometimes whole sections of your site) and no HTML version, is a SEO suicide.	-3
	Domains, URLs, Web Mastery
59	Keyword-rich URLs and filenames	A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and Bing.	+3
60	Site Accessibility	Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.	+3
61	Sitemap	It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.	+2
62	Site size	Spiders love large sites, so generally it is the bigger, the better. However, big sites become user-unfriendly and difficult to navigate, so sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site into a couple of smaller ones. On the other hand, there are hardly sites that are penalized because they are 10,000+ pages, so don't split your size in pieces only because it is getting larger and larger.	+2
63	Site age	Similarly to wine, older sites are respected more. The idea is that an old, established site is more trustworthy (they have been around and are here to stay) than a new site that has just poped up and might soon disappear.	+2
64	Site theme	It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that matter. The site theme is even more important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to this theme.	+2
65	File Location on Site	File location is important and files that are located in the root directory or near it tend to rank better than files that are buried 5 or more levels below.	+1
66	Domains versus subdomains, separate domains	Having a separate domain is better – i.e. instead of having blablabla.blogspot.com, register a separate blablabla.com domain.	+1
67	Top-level domains (TLDs)	Not all TLDs are equal. There are TLDs that are better than others. For instance, the most popular TLD – .com – is much better than .ws, .biz, or .info domains but (all equal) nothing beats an old .edu or .org domain.	+1
68	Hyphens in URLs	Hyphens between the words in an URL increase readability and help with SEO rankings. This applies both to hyphens in domain names and in the rest of the URL.	+1
69	URL length	Generally doesn't matter but if it is a very long URL-s, this starts to look spammy, so avoid having more than 10 words in the URL (3 or 4 for the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of address is acceptable).	0
70	IP address	Could matter only for shared hosting or when a site is hosted with a free hosting provider, when the IP or the whole C-class of IP addresses is blacklisted due to spamming or other illegal practices.	0
71	Adsense will boost your ranking	Adsense is not related in any way to SEO ranking. Google will definitely not give you a ranking bonus because of hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might boost your income but this has nothing to do with your search rankings.	0
72	Adwords will boost your ranking	Similarly to Adsense, Adwords has nothing to do with your search rankings. Adwords will bring more traffic to your site but this will not affect your rankings in whatsoever way.	0
73	Hosting downtime	Hosting downtime is directly related to accessibility because if a site is frequently down, it can't be indexed. But in practice this is a factor only if your hosting provider is really unreliable and has less than 97-98% uptime.	-1
74	Dynamic URLs	Spiders prefer static URLs, though you will see many dynamic pages on top positions. Long dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are really bad and in any case you'd better use a tool to rewrite dynamic URLs in something more human- and SEO-friendly.	-1
75	Session IDs	This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don't use session IDs for information that you'd like to be indexed by spiders.	-2
76	Bans in robots.txt	If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site.	-2
77	Redirects (301 and 302)	When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique, when the visitor is immediately taken to a different page.	-3

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