Tuning Your SEO For the Mythical Google Sandbox

Time to clean out your online garage this fall? If you're like me you haven't spent the time to go back and clean up old site pages, links and broken, worn out HTML. What a surprise it was when I went back to some of my old posts on this site and other sites only to find a batch of bad links that had either expired or moved. Once I noticed that, I then started thinking about re-examining my entire portfolio.

Part of the reason I embarked on this effort was due to an article I read about the mythical Google sandbox, that is, the temporary place where you live in Google's search engine space when building out a new website, blog or community mashup page.

The deeper issue posed by this article was the effect of proper search engine optimization on your site's ability to jump out of Google's sandbox into a higher ranked page. Whether or not the sandbox exists I still believe that the Google algorithm to change my site rank is what happened to the site I mentioned in my last three articles on The Online Money Making Secret You Shouldn't Know. I happened to notice that my search volume jumped last Feb without really knowing why. This was exactly six months from the time I created the site.

Could I be on to something here? Typically, I can get some faster page rank on new sites (about six weeks) for low volume keyword phrases. But maybe things have changed a bit with Google's formulas. Leaving the mythical sandbox might take longer now. Nevertheless, trying to improve your site is critical to your search engine optimization success. You should always revisit your sites, blogs, lenses, etc. to build for the future.

So here are the things you should do in your fall cleanup:

1. Fix all broken links - if the link is gone then remove the hyperlink tags and just underline the link with a broken link annotation.

2. Check your site's HTML and CSS consistency - have you been fiddling with your site layout but forgetting to check if it is completely clean? Did you happen to leave out an end tag?

3. Optimize for SEO - do your pages have titles that are keyword friendly? Are your page titles optimized to remove the site or blog name on every page?

4. Get your critical section headers optimized - be sure all keyword focused pages have H1 tags on the section or paragraph headers. Move any unnecessary H1 tags away from deep within the main flow of the html - in other words, have the title and H1 tags be near the top of your page source.

5. Highlight keyword phrases - be sure to add bold headings around your optimized keywords.

6. Add alt keys to your images - always add descriptive keywords as alt tags to your site images.

The Online Money Making Secret You Shouldn't Know - Part 3

After getting back from a long vacation in the desert Southwest I was startled to find that my high volume search keyword site had shown some significant growth in the last 2 months (if you haven't read Part 1 you can find it here, or Part 2 which can be found here).

If you remember I mentioned that having a site devoted to a keyword phrase that has extremely high monthly search volume can be a great way to make money online and boost your online marketing strategy. After reviewing one of my own sites I thought I might show you what kind of results you may get (DISCLAIMER - your results will vary!).

I initially built my site on August 21st, 2006 with just a couple of pages but focused on three extremely high volume keyword phrases in the entertainment industry that I thought might work well. I really didn't spend much time on it for the first two months or so but then picked up in October by promoting it as much as I could (as noted in Part 2 of these articles).

My AdSense revenue was limited with my first revenue click occurring on November 4th and my November average revenue being $0.60 / day for a total of $17 - not bad considering I only put two hours into it. Now, this is a bit unfair considering the search engines had from Aug. 21st to about Oct. 20th to index my site before I really pushed the search engine optimization. I'm not sure how long the engines would have taken had I started pushing the site sooner.

In December I focused entirely on adding content with about 7 more pages of site articles and information really ignoring backlinks from external directories, forums, blogs, and articles. My AdSense revenue stayed about the same until about Feb. 12th. I'm not sure why (my guess is my search engine rankings went up) but my visits jumped by a factor of about 8x. This didn't really increase the revenue because the clickthrough rates were low.

After reading some of Brad Callen's books (be sure to subscribe to the Agile Marketer Newsletter to get a free SEO ebook from him, or, really become a SEO expert and buy SEO Elite probably the best SEO package available) I decided to modify my ad placements based on his research. By the end of April I was nearing $1 / day on one site with only five hours of total work.

By continually adding content , promoting and reorging the ads I now had a site that was curving upward in daily hits (from about 30 a day in late 2006 to 700 a day by June 2007). Well, to make a long story short here are my results from August:

By Google's Terms of Service I can't show you the clickthrough rates or page impressions. But you can see the daily earnings for just this single site (I've filtered out all my other AdSense earnings).

So, what's the moral of this story? With NOT a lot of work and some patience, diligence and focused high volume keywords you should be able to do the same fairly easily. If your goal is to work from home then this might just be one part of your arsenal to get started. Just be sure to keep the content flowing.

The Online Money Making Secret You Shouldn't Know - Part 2

So, continuing from yesterday (if you haven't read Part 1 you can find it here) I mentioned that having a site devoted to a keyword phrase that has extremely high monthly search volume can be a great way to start your online marketing strategy. If you can grab only a slight percentage of that volume you can see some quick income - maybe not the millions you read about all the time, but, at least a great beginning.

Where should you start? The first thing you should look at are the top 500 search terms on the internet. You can usually find these on various sites devoted to keyword research - in fact, Google, AOL and Yahoo typically show the search volumes by month. If you haven't done this before be ready for a boat-load of entertainment keywords - most of the top 500 are going to be actors/actresses, bands, shows, songs, etc. Be ready - it becomes somewhat humorous to see what people search for out in cyberspace.

Here are some sites you can start with:

1. The Lycos 50 - a great place to start that has lists going back at least 5 years.

2. Hot Searches on AOL - gives top terms by category

3. Google Trends - is a list of the top 100 by date - this would be a great way to search trending hot topics over time.

4. Yahoo Buzz - in addition to lists has some very interesting articles on popular topics.

Next, if you really want to discover the deeper monthly search volumes for your list you can get a free trial account at Keyword Discovery. They have the monthly stats you need to see just how big your search phrase really is. Of course you can always use the standard Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool which also shows monthly volumes. This site is down quite often so you may have to try it a few times before seeing a page or results.

Once you've found the very popular keyword phrase you want to promote then you should create a Blogger blog with that phrase being the key term in the posts. Place your Adsense ads strategically in the top and top left panels of the blog for maximum exposure. Remember, the Adsense TOS states only a max of three ad placements per page.

What should you post? There's plenty of free content out there to find - free articles, videos, blog links, even news articles (be aware you may not duplicate a news article in your blog - you must fully rewrite the content in your own words.) Be sure to keep the content flowing - don't be afraid to list you own opinions, top ten lists, interesting facts, etc.

Finally, do everything in your power to promote the page daily - that means having a link backs to your site through:

1. Blog search engines / Directories
2. Forums devoted to your topic - have your link in the post signature
3. Articles - if you can think of an article, write it and post it to as many free article directories as possible
4. Press releases - think of a spin on your blog and announce it - see my post The Power of Press Releases5. Link exchanges
6. Blogroll exchanges

If you don't know how to create backlinks using these methods then I strongly suggest that you buy both Holly Mann's Honest Riches and Ewen Chia's Newbie Cash Machine. Those two guides have all the steps and techniques you need to do - which is a bargain at $37 and $27 respectively. That's only $64 total with practically all the knowledge you need to become successful online marketers.

Plus, don't forget to be productive every day - ten minutes a day will do the trick. Read my post on being productive.

Good luck! I hope this helps you make money online. Check out Part 3 of this article here!

The Online Money Making Secret You Shouldn't Know - Part 1

When I scan internet marketing forums from time to time I always see a post from someone new to online work lamenting that they have created a fantastic new site with some early promotion but have yet to see a single penny of Adsense or affiliate revenue. I see the cries like "I've spent all of this time learning, building and promoting but I'm not making any money online! Help!"

Those of us who have suffered the bruises and bumps of trial and error over the years know that striking gold online takes education, patience, hard work and above all - time. (Yes, there are those who do luck into a good strategy - but that is the minority). Beginners expectations are very high and excitement gets tempered quickly when traffic counts are minimal.

I'm going to reveal a secret on how to make money online that I hope you, the reader, takes to heart. The best way for a beginner to get some simple revenue flowing is to create an Adsense site tied to an extremely high volume keyword phrase. Let me rephrase that another way - create a site or blog that focuses on one of the most popular keyword phrases found on the internet today.

I know this seems contrary to what most marketers are telling you but I know that this secret works - it's simple, easy and will start your revenue stream. The reason marketers don't focus on this technique is because you're competing with potentially tens of millions of other sites - how on earth can you be even remotely visible in a competitive space like that?

The answer is because there is so much monthly search volume for those keyword phrases. By creating a site devoted to one of these phrases and then promoting it as much as you possibly can, you will start to see a percentage of hits from that extreme volume even if it is a tiny amount. If you look at monthly volumes of phrases such as 'ipod', 'song lyrics' or 'funny videos' you'll see an incredible amount of traffic with 3.6M, 2.2M, and 1.0M monthly hits respectively. Compare this to 'internet marketing' which gets .6M per month or 'make money online' with a mere .15M per month.

You can start to see the method here - a small percentage of a high volume adds up! I have a site devoted to an entertainment keyphrase that I barely maintain and is currently netting me $3 / day in Adsense revenue. For about 10 hours of total effort I'm making about $1000 / year. What a great way to get yourself funded without much effort.

Where should you start? More on this tomorrow - follow this link to Part 2.

The Power of Press Releases for SEO Page Rank

One of the best and easiest ways to improve your page rank is to create a press release announcing any new ideas, releases, changes or websites. I'm constantly confused as to why people don't use this avenue much more often. As I mentioned in my last email, writing and publishing releases is very easy to do and has huge benefits for search optimization and ranking.

The primary goal of any press release is to announce some type of exciting event for your business. Extending this model to your website, online press releases provide a means to delivering that information to as many news subscribers as possible. What that means to your own business is one-way links back to your site and subsequent increased traffic. The long term benefit is a good jump in both Google and Yahoo's search rankings which directly affects your bottom line - to make money online.

Let's take a look at my latest release. You simply need a catchy title such as 'Dedicated to Successful Internet Marketing, The Agile Marketer Launches New Site'. You will also need a high level description - mine, for example, is 'Internet strategist, Don James, releases his on line success secrets in the newly launched Agile Marketer website.' The rest is three to four simple paragraphs describing what you key announcement will be. Remember, this can be for any type of new or changed business concept from your sites.

So where do you submit press releases? Some of my favorite press release sites are:

PRWeb.com - a great place to submit releases. It has a page rank of 7 and can really boost your own rankings. The cost varies depending on how much exposure you want. You can go as low as free up to $360 per release. Each level gives you greater distribution and visibility. I typically pay $10 per release just for simple link backs.

Free Press Release - this has a page rank of 5 and is either free or $1 per release (with a minimum funding of $5) for Premiere releases.

I-Newswire - another pr site with a page rank of 7 and has both a free submission and $25 optimized submission.

You can basically name your price for the amount of exposure you need. Whatever you do to increase your site's page rank be sure to always consider using press releases.

Are You an Expert?

Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. Although I like to read HBRs articles from time to time I usually don't have enough time to dig into them due to the sheer amount of quality content. However, in this case I made an exception.

The article, called The Making of an Expert, had me immediately and completely engrossed from the first paragraph. It is a topic I have pondered before but not to the level of detail that K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely, the authors, did.

The basic premise behind the idea is that inequality of skills may not necessarily due to innate talent or brain chemistry but just simply a significant amount of concentrated effort over a long period of time. When you see any kind of virtuoso or sport superstar do you presuppose that the person in question had some kind of disposition for that talent in the first place? I know I did. Nevertheless, the author flies in the face of this notion and states the following premise:

Becoming an expert is not about innate talent or skill but about spending a significant number of hours of concentrated effort on the skill directly. In fact, he goes on to say that approximately 10,000 - 15,000 hours is needed to become a virtuoso.

I've thought about many people that I have known over the years and their level of skill. Does Author's theory fit my own experience? A very good friend of mine was a supurb guitar player. By the time he was 16 he was in demand and noted for his talent. Growing up with him I knew specifically how much time he devoted to his skill. He started playing when he was 9 so had 7 years under his belt. I know that based on his habits he probably averaged out to 2 hours a day and that may be a bit high - however I'll give him the benefit of doubt.

Working through the numbers means that in those 7 years he devoted about 5000 hours of time to his skill putting him in an elite group of guitar players within a local region. I can think of other cases as well such that it seems the time to get even to an elite status my be within the 3000-5000 hour range. I would even suggest that doctors go through this kind of effort during their residencies to boost them into an elite status (3 years at 10 hours a day average is about 10,000 hours) although I think that true concentrated effort may be half that. Nevertheless, the goal is to build on top of the effort spent in med school.

Now I'm not going to argue that there are innate talents, physique and smarts that give one person an advantage over another. No doubt that some will excel much faster than others. But the author's argument is that those who are young and coached get a distinct concentrated effort advantage.

Here is my own theory based on the article
2500 hours - considered very skilled, very good.
5000 hours - excellence
7500 hours - master
10,000 hours - expert or virtuoso

What does that translate to your own work? If you spend 2 hours of concentrated effort a day you will be a very skilled pratitioner in your field of study in 3 years (about 2200 hours). This could be applied to any skillset be it sports, academics, business, arts, and even working to make money online, etc. Of course, 2 hours of concentrated effort a day is quite a bit for any adult.

Whatever your intended knowledge and skillset this article might be a good measuring stick for your own success.

Ewen Chia's Newbie Cash Machine - A Review

(Even though I reviewed these some years back - they are still great resources in 2011) I’ve got to tell you right off that Ewen Chia constantly surprises me with his Affiliate Marketing material. Just on whim I was doing some Clickbank research and discovered that his ebook, Newbie List Machine (used to be Newbie Cash Machine) was soaring to the top of all Clickbank ebooks with a very high gravity rating.
If you don’t know who Ewen Chia is just remember that he is synonymous with affiliate marketing and ways to make money online. Sometimes called the world’s #1 affiliate marketer Ewen has trounced the competition with amazing results with online business rollouts of $100,000 to $1.5M within days - even hours! You may disagree with me but in my opinion he’s easily one of the top 10 internet marketers in the world today. An amazing speaker, lecturer and teacher Ewen has expanded his current subscriber base is to over 300,000 worldwide!

Being a fan of Ewen’s from day one (I love his Secret Affiliate Weapon 2 - a massive bargin at $17!) I’ve found that his techniques have helped me tremendously over the last few years. In fact, he usually provides so much insanely useful information that I typically forget some of the tips he’s given me. When I go back and re-read his past ebooks I’m always surprised that I forgot a lot of the information which I could have easily benefited from.

And yet he’s done it again! Another ebook so full of information that you’ll need a notepad to keep track of all the important steps. But that’s just the beginning - where Ewen has added the most significant value is by creating a step by step framework for brand new or intermediate marketers to get online and build profits fast.

I want to digress a bit and talk to you about what a framework is and why it is important. I am a systems/software architect by trade and have worked with many Fortune 100 systems, vendors and packages in the past. When any large company or vendor wants to create something that is less expensive and easy to implement they typically create a framework.

Frameworks are tested pre-packaged, pre-built components that let you get the job done much faster that just a list of information. Ewen’s framework on how to make money online is something that has already worked in the marketplace. A tried and true affiliate guide that is more than just information.

I spent the last 2 days reading though his ebook in detail. Here’s what you get:

- What an Online Business is and Your Value to the Marketplace
- The Easiest Way to Start Your Online Business
- What Affiliate Marketing is All About
- The Actual Newbie List Machine Step by Step System - A Proven Internet Success Formula which includes:

Market Ideas, Keyword Research, Competition Research, High Converting Affiliate Programs, Setting Up Your Affiliate Links, Email Lists, Email Copy, Landing Pages, Review Copy, Traffic Generators and More!

That’s just a very high level view of what’s in this 141 page guide (that’s right - 141 pages)!! What I love about Ewen’s technique is that he shows you detailed examples of the sites, layouts, ad copy, landing page copy, affiliate setup and pay per click with actual text and screen captures. You’re not left in the dark trying to navigate new sites without a step by step visual guide - that is huge!

You’re probably thinking right now ‘who should buy this guide’? This guide is primarily focused on the brand new internet marketer or an intermediate marketer who hasn’t found a focus yet. Nevertheless, I must say that as an advanced marketer I found that the sections devoted to the ad and email copy as well as some of the landing page techniques were very useful to me and well worth the money.
What didn't I like about this book? Well, I think the first 2 chapters will be a repeat for even beginner marketers. It seems like we get these same intros in every online marketing guide. But, if it is your first then it won't be a problem. Also, many will be familiar with the online tools that he uses so that those specific tutorials won't be very valuable. But, those are pretty small nits considering the amount of content.

There is no doubt that this ebook is vastly underpriced at $27 for the massive amount of information you receive. If you are having any doubts about your ability to make money online I would strongly suggest that you pick up copy of the Newbie List Machine and follow it to the letter!