Search Engine Ranking - The Wikipedia Way

A friend recently asked me 'What's all this crazy nonsense I keep hearing about authority and trust now on all of the IM sites?'? Yes, I've preached it myself. The mantras for 2010 and 2011 have been 'You gotta have authority and you gotta have trust!' Just what is all this noise about?

If you remember from my previous post Your Not Making Any Money Online without Authority, I said that Google is trying to improve their search results continually to judge, rank and read sites just as a human would. They're basically building a form of very static artificial intelligence to be able to pick and choose your content as if you were weeding through looking for a specific result. And this engine is only getting better - to a more dynamic intelligence.

All well and good right? What does that mean to you? You need to sit back and ask yourself how you trust sites and give them authority as a normal activity. For example, how would you judge, say, a wealth building site that had AdSense ads plastered all over it with hundreds of pages that you suspect are just a pile of crappy PLR articles. They're pretty easy to spot - tons of keyword stuffing, no personal writing style, slapped together with one purpose in mind - making money off the poor git who might click an ad.

Blogger FTP Migration - Success!

Whew! I have to tell you that I really sweated this one out.  I wasn't sure that this migration from my own hosting center back to Blogger / Google hosting was really going to work with the upcoming FTP shutdown occurring on May 1st.  The Agile Marketer has been around for about 4 years now - slowly climbing the SEO organic ladder (yes, I remember being one of the first guys to post on John Chow's site when he started it) nearing the top 10 list.  I've been using this site for my personal opinions and learnings on how to make money online -  making this site's Google ranking very, very important to me.

What I wasn't sure about was that the ranking would drop and/or the migration would fail miserably.  So, let's go through what I learned along the way and how easy or difficult this migration turned out to be.

Let me backup a bit and describe my particular migration problem. The Agile Marketer site consists of a Blogger blog posts as the default landing pages with some ASP.NET scripts as side pages (for dynamic content such as the Free Affiliate Link Cloaker).  In this case Blogger FTP's all of the files to the root path of the domain (www.agilemarketer.com).  Most people have a site blog that they publish to such as (www.agilemarketer.com/blog/) - but that was not my case.

Just When You're Making Money Online - Google Cancels Blogger FTP

Ugh! Yes it is tax time and Blogger time. You've probably noticed over the last few years that The Agile Marketer is a Blogger blog - something I've enjoyed using for a number of years for my core site (this one) and many other profitable affiliate and AdSense sites.

The bad news is that on May 1st Google is pulling the plug on posting your Blogger blog on an externally hosted website. This is tough news for those of us who have many blogs - and, if you haven't guessed, something I've been working on for the last four weeks.

What really bothers me, however, is the fact that The Agile Marketer has reached #26 in Google for the exact search term 'Learn How to Make Money Online ' and #52 for the unquoted term - a very, very competitive keyword phrase (125M results).  This site has been slowly and surely moving up the Google ladder over the last 2 years with a significant amount of effort.

The rub now is that moving this site back to being Google hosted is going to cause a number of problems:

Learn How to Make Money Online - Affiliate Marketing Success Story

Success sometimes comes slowly. About a year ago I was posting step by step guidelines to easily build a free, yet effective affiliate marketing website. You can go back and find the series called IM101: here - Start Internet Marketing with EPIC Steps and here - Finding Your First Product to Market. (Go back and read all seven of the articles if you want more information).

So you may have wondered why I haven't written about this example in about 1 full year. The reason is pure patience. My example was a very low key, simple content driven site focused specifically on a Clickbank dieting product that I personally purchased, read, and endorse. I spent about 8 to 16 hours total last January and just left the site pretty much alone except for publishing a few more articles that I thought were good material and pertinent to the product.

Well, as you probably know, content sites do take some time to rise up the search engine ranks especially if you haven't focused on building out the site daily. Nevertheless, if you are really intent to learn how to make money online keep on reading.

Taxes, Spending and Earning More Money Online

There's nothing like starting a post with the word taxes to drive you away from reading this faster than a rattlesnake right by your foot. Nonetheless, I had to start this post with something that came to mind as I was preparing my taxes this week (well, not really preparing - just hunting and gathering for the tax guy).

If you're like me you've probably found yourself spread across multiple marketing fronts online - from products, articles, affiliate work, blogs, seo, etc. As much fun as this can be (plus some work) you may have either forgotten or abandoned some of your work done in the past. This can get pretty easy when you get focused making money online with a new endeavor while giving in to some others that really didn't pan out.

What this comes down to in many ways is that you are probably spending too much money and could tighten you belt a little in 2010. Let's look at some of the core expenses and see where you might be able increase your profits with just a little effort.

Making Money Online with Daily Work

Continuing from yesterday I wanted to talk more about how the site, 'Make Money Online' was able to dominate that very same keyword phrase. If you felt the urge to examine Alan's site in detail you might have noticed one interesting feature - virtually daily posts centered around his core keyword phrases. What's even more amazing is that he used completely free methods to reach his goal! Astonishing!

Let's do some simple math on what he might be making right now from that site. Twelve medium ad spaces for $120 a month = $1440, two large banners for $300 a month, and text link for $180 a month = $1920 / month just in advertising alone. Using those numbers alone you can see that day to day focus can really pay off in a high performing niche. Plus, it shows that you don't have to have an expensive, fancy site to do this.

Build it Right to Learn How to Make Money Online

Ok, listen, don't make the same mistake that I did not that long ago. I built a fairly successful site a couple of years ago that was moving up in the Google rankings - I can't say it was one of my more carefully thought out sites, but, had a fair amount of content nonetheless.

You see, about a year ago I started to get very excited about keyword optimization by focusing more on my blog titles, headers and highlighted information. Thinking that I was helping my other site, I went in and altered all of the headers, meta tags, main page title, etc. Guess what? Google dropped my site like a rock out of their top listings. Ouch - that's one tough way to learn how to make money online!

After sitting back and pondering this a bit I realized that I had shot myself in the foot by over optimizing (and, really over thinking) the problem at hand. Google got it as well - my site had changed too much - thus the search king had to re-index it. Lesson learned (or, as the oddly say in England 'lesson learnt').

Today's web marketing lesson is all about building it right the first time - why keyword optimization must be a priority when you plan and prototype. Yes, you can change core keyword phrases along the way but, you must do it very gradually. That's really beside the point here.

What I want to stress to you is the need to start with good keyword research first - targeting your core keyword phrase and then all relevant variations on it. Let's take a great example that, I think, will show you how to approach this problem with some powerful ammunition for your own work.

If you've done some research online for sites devoted to earning money online - you may have noticed a site appear about 1-2 years ago for the search term 'make money online'. Go ahead and type it into Google without the quotes.

The #1 site is Alan Liew's Blogger site (yes, a Blogger site!) - here's a screenshot:



Now, if you pay special attention to his site you'll see that the keyword phrase 'make money online' is the predominate term on his site - from the main page and throughout his post titles and links. What's not quite so apparent is that all inbound links to his site are also titled 'Make Money Online' from forum posts to articles.

What Alan did right was focus immediately on the keyword phrase he desired to dominate and did it in about two years! Kudos to him and his perseverance - his example is a complete success in a massively competitive market (157,000,000 results).

This shows that staying the course with your keyword phrase is one of the most important steps to building your site. Be sure to use one of the keyword tools out there to find a phrase you want to market to and stick to it! If you keep diligent - you will succeed.