Quick post today!

Every year we put together a list of the top search engine optimization posts of the year.

The idea is to make it easy for you to find the most important post of the year from some of the top experts in the field.

If you’re interested in improving your search engine rankings then this list is a must read for you!

You can check out the list here: Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year

Comments and thoughts are appreciated as always! What are your favorite SEO blogs?

It’s been a while since my last AdSense post so to continue with the series on From $0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense here is Part 6. If you haven’t been following along or need a quick recap our Money Making Formula is $ = V x CTR x CPC. In previous posts I focused on:

V (Volume of Traffic)

1. The formula for AdSense success: $ = V x CTR x CPC
2. Have other people write the content for you

CTR (Click Through Rate)

1. Location, Location, Location
2. Don’t Make Ads Look Like Ads!
3. Focus on Ad Relevancy

Today’s lesson is…

Get the Right Traffic

We’re still going to focus on improving your CTR for this lesson and where your visitors come from can have a dramatic effect on how much money you can make.

There are a number of ways you can drive traffic to your website including getting repeat visitors and finding new visitors through search engines, social media, and partner websites.

“It’s called banner blindness – the more people visit the same website, the more they know where the ads are, and the less likely they are to click on them.”

Repeat vs. First Time Visitors

Let’s first focus in on getting repeat versus first time visitors. Repeat visitors are more loyal, will buy more from you, will tell more people about your site, will link to you… but they won’t click on ads! It’s called banner blindness – the more people visit the same website, the more they know where the ads are, and the less likely they are to click on them.

Think about your own experience with your favorite blogs and websites. When was the last time you clicked on an ad from that site?

This is a main reason why bloggers can have a hard time making money through AdSense – it’s not that blogs themselves are not profitable, it’s that many of the visitors are returning blog subscribers and they won’t click on your ads. If you have a lot of loyal, repeat visitors then you’ll likely have a better time selling your own product or recommending other products and taking a commission because these people trust you and will listen to your recommendations whereas a first time visitor doesn’t know who you are and won’t care about your suggestions – but they will click on your ads.

If you want to make more money through AdSense, the message is simple: You need to focus on getting those first time visitors.

Not All First Time Visitors Are Created Equal

Now that we’ve established that you need to focus on first time visitors, the question becomes “What kind of traffic source should I focus on? Search engines? Social media? Partner websites?” I’ll break these down for you individually.

Social Media: There is no question that social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg can drive thousands and thousands of visitors to your website. I’ve had an article hit the homepage of Digg and it actually caused our servers to melt because we had too much traffic coming all at once.

“If you serve up too many AdSense ads that don’t get clicked, Google will stop showing high paying ads on your site so not only can social media traffic cause your website to crash, it won’t lead to a lot of clicks, and can actually reduce the quality of future ads that get shown on your site.”

Great news right? Unfortunately no… almost none of the social media traffic clicked on my AdSense ads. People who come from social media websites  a) are generally very web savvy and quickly spot your ads and ignore them and b) are browsers looking for a way to kill time – they aren’t really interested in solving a problem and are unlikely to click on an ad that offers a solution to a problem.

Even worse, if you serve up too many AdSense ads that don’t get clicked, Google will stop showing high paying ads on your site so not only can social media traffic cause your website to crash, it won’t lead to a lot of clicks, and can actually reduce the quality of future ads that get shown on your site. Social media definitely has a place in your overall marketing efforts but don’t count on it to help your AdSense revenue.

Partner Websites: Partner websites can be a good source of targeting traffic, assuming that the referring site is related to your own. If your website is about cars and you get linked from a beauty supply website, I wouldn’t expect too many click conversions.

Traffic from partner websites will generally have a higher conversion than social media traffic but you will still get a lot of people who are just browsing and aren’t really interested in your content or ads . It can also be really hard to get a lot of traffic from partner websites that is targeted. Remember the V in $ = V x CTR x CPC Money Making Formula is Volume of Traffic. If you can’t get many many people coming to your site then you won’t make much money with AdSense.

“Search engine traffic is the holy grail of AdSense revenue and should be your primary target.”

Search Engines: Search engine traffic is the holy grail of AdSense revenue and should be your primary target. People who come to your website through search engines are typically looking for a solution to a problem which will make them more likely to click through on ads. They are also not as web savvy as social media visitors so if you do a good job in not making your ads look like ads, they will spend more time reading your AdSense offers and clicking through on them which means money in your pocket.

To get some tips on how to improve your search engine rankings and traffic there are a number of great bloggers who cover the topic and I also write a regular series on search engine optimization as well.

The bottom line here is if you want to have a high click through rate then you need to focus on getting as many people finding your website through the search engines as possible. Google has suggested that an average click through rate should be 1-5%. If you’re not in there (or above… why do you just want to be average?) then it’s time to focus on getting more search engine visitors and the other methods I’ve already discussed to improve your click through rate.

What have your experiences been with search engine vs. social media vs. repeat visitors and their impact on your AdSense revenue? Do you have any examples to share?

I’ve love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Photo credit: labnol

Me With John Carr

At my last SEO for Africa I introduced a new initiative called SEO Buffet. The concept is simple: I’ll give you free advice for your website and profile you on my blog if you bring me food from your cultural background!

The first person to respond was John Carr. John is a Toronto based real estate agent who is trying to get his website, PrimeTorontoNeighbourhoods.com increased visibility in the search engines. John brought up a delicious assortment of chicken, beef, cheese, and vegetable empanadas that were representative of his Chilean culture.

Here was my advice for John:

1) Pay Attention To Your Titles

You need content to rank in Google and John has created a blog which is updated regularly using WordPress (http://www.primetorontoneighbourhoods.com/blog/). When you’re using a blogging platform you want to carefully select the titles of your blog posts because whatever you choose will impact your title tag, URL, and header tag (three of the most important ranking factors).

Make sure you put your keywords in the proper order and as close to the start of the title as possible. For example, if John was trying to rank for “Lawrence Park Homes” he should write a post with a title like “Lawrence Park Homes – Recent Trends” instead of something like “Recent trends for people looking at buying a home in Lawrence Park.” In the second example, the keywords are split up (home in Lawrence Park) and are at the end of the post. Put them together and move them to the front of the title to get the best results.

Delicious Empanadas from Chile

2) Get Links

You can have the most optimized content in the world but if you don’t have external websites pointing to yours then you won’t rank very prominently in Google. I encouraged John to think about people who might be willing to link to him.

A quick example is the real estate company he’s affiliated with. He pays a regular fee for using their services and should insist that they also link to his website from theirs. Other opportunities are to think about everybody he does business with on a regular basis and moving the offline partnerships online. This blog post will get him an extra link but he needs to go out and get more links to overthrow his competition.

My two programmers enjoying lunch!

3) Build Resource Guides

This last point is more focused on conversion than on SEO. John has picked a number of niche neighborhoods to sell in and attracts a number of people to the site who come, never contact him, and leave. It’s important to build as much value up front as possible to build the relationship because the next real estate agent is just around the corner trying to get the same customers. I recommended he build a resource guide for each community he specializes in. Profile what the neighborhood is known for, what the entertainment is like, how good the schools are, where the parks are, etc… basically all the information someone who is interested in the neighborhood would want to know. John already has the information in his head from his years of experience, he just needs to put it into a document and make it free online as a PDF if prospects leave their name and email. Now he’s able to build the relationship by offering tremendous upfront value and become the agent of choice.

I also recommended that he allow people to sign up for updates about their neighborhoods of choice so they could get notices when new homes came on the market. It’s a service any agent will offer but if you allow people to sign up for it themselves online you make it easier for them to do business with you.

I hope you enjoyed the first post in this new series – stay tuned for more SEO Buffet posts in the future! And thanks John for the great food!

What do you think of John’s website? Would you give him any other recommendations?

I’ve love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

(Photo Credit: Jeff McNeill) This is a special edition of SEO University where I have a guest post by Elisa Gabbert. Elisa was introduced to me by Byron Gordon, a great guy who I’ve worked with for a couple of years at the Search Engine Strategies conferences here in Toronto. When Byron asks me to check something out, it’s usually good!

Byron said I should check out WordStream’s new keyword tool located at http://www.wordstream.com/keywords. For years I’ve been a fan of using Google’s free tools, namely the Google Keyword Tool and the Google Traffic Estimator Tool. They are both free, provide great data, and it comes directly from Google – what more could you ask for?

I posed the question to Byron and he put me on to Elisa who wrote this guest post. I look forward to your thoughts on WordStream vs. Google after you read the post.

“At WordStream, we recently launched a new free keyword tool. One of the questions we get asked frequently is how the tool compares to the Google keyword tool (in fact it gets asked so frequently we put it in the FAQ).

Let me try to run down the pros and cons of using each tool.

Where Google’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool is similar to many of their products in that it has two core strengths: it uses Google data, and they give it away for free. If you’re in a market (and there are many) where Google is the dominant player, having access to Google’s data can definitely be useful. And Google has a lot of data.

The tool also provides several columns of numerical stats including both local and global monthly search volume and search volume trends, as well as information like advertiser competition and estimated average CPC which can be useful for the PPC advertiser. Aside from keywords and related terms, WordStream’s tool currently only shows you an estimated relative volume.

Where WordStream’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool taps into the company’s huge data sources, but they’re not giving you full access to that data. For example, a search for “britney spears” returns 72 results. Performing the same search on our tool yields over 37,000 keywords. We only show you the top 100 within the tool itself, but you can enter your email (or sign up for a free account) and we’ll send you the full list, all 37,563 keyword phrases, free of cost. So we are giving you a lot more to work with, including many long-tail terms, and this is really valuable for large PPC accounts or affiliate marketers especially.

Another advantage to our keyword tool is a greater diversity of keyword sources. We aggregate search query data from Internet Service Providers, browser toolbars and search engines—amounting to more than a billion unique keywords and over a trillion search queries—and we carefully weight the data to avoid bias toward any particular source. So our data is more comprehensive.

The “related keywords” feature allows you to select related terms and synonyms and include them in the results with your original query. Again, this is important for keyword expansion and can tell you what other phrases your audience may be using to search for related topics.

There’s also a filter feature so you can weed out terms that aren’t relevant to your search.

Finally, WordStream’s keyword tool is faster than Google’s. You get results pretty much instantaneously.

In the end, the point of using any of these tools is to get keyword suggestions, and it’s important to remember that they are in fact just suggestions—many of them may be irrelevant to your website or business. The more data you start out with, the more usable, actionable keywords you’re going to end up with after you drill down and figure out which terms are going to be most relevant and valuable for you. Then you can get to work optimizing your web copy and PPC campaigns based on those keywords, which in turn gives you more data to analyze (like which keywords drive the most traffic and conversions, and which aren’t delivering any value). This creates a cycle of data-driven decision making.

Our view is that keywords in and of themselves aren’t worth anything. It’s what you do with your keyword list that matters. That’s why we developed the tool. We hope that dedicated search marketers will stick around to learn the benefits of keyword management—tools and strategies that help you group, organize and act on all that raw keyword data to get real results in return.”

Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, a software manufacturer specializing in keyword discovery & management software for SEO and PPC. To get in touch with Elisa, you can send a note to egabbert at wordstream dot com, follow her on twitter, or check out the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog, where she’s a regular contributor.

What do you think about the WordStream Keyword Tool? Are you going to give it a try? I would love to hear your thoughts on the tool if you comment below!

It’s time for Part 2 in my series on Link Building Tactics. As I mentioned before, links are an important part of Google’s algorithm – if you don’t have links to your site, you won’t rank well for your keywords. Last month I wrote about how you can check the real number of links coming into your website and how you can use that information to build relationships and generate even more links (Link Building Tactics Series – SEO University).

Today I want to continue the series and talk about the most basic component of generating links which is:

Write Quality Content

If you want people to link to you then you need to write content that is worth linking to (also known as “linkbait”)! Create interesting, relevant content that your target audience would find valuable. Identify what pains or problems your customers / readers are facing and give them solution that is easy to digest and makes them curious to learn more.

So What?

Your content should answer the question So What? Why should readers care what you are writing about? Your customers are bombarded with more websites and articles than they know what to do with! Unless your content can answer the So What? question, readers will move on to find an expert who will.

300-500 Words

How long should an article be? A guideline that I always recommend is at least 300 and aim for 500. If the article is below 300 words then it’s harder to get picked up in the search engines. 500 seems to be an ideal number because it’s enough to get your thoughts out on a specific topic. Keep your articles short and focused. If you’re writing over 1,000 words it’s better to split the content up into two 500+ word articles. This way your articles will be more readable, will stay focused on one topic, and you can get more search engine traffic to two shorter articles than one long one.

Look To Niche Social Networking Sites

To get ideas for what topics to cover and how to position your content check out a niche social media sites that caters specifically to your audience. For example, if you target small business owners, you would want to look at BizSugar.com.

A quick glance at their Hot Topics show what small business owners are currently interested in. It will also show you the types of titles that attract attention. The titles of the top 5 articles are:

• Franchise Mathematics; How Many More Franchise Broker Networks Do We Need?
• Six Ways to Improve Employee Morale Without Breaking the Bank
• Why Your Twitter Followers Aren’t Leads…Or Are They?
• Act Like a Child and Increase Your Small Business Marketing Skills
• The 7 Ages Of Your Business – From Enthusiasm To Exhaustion

Notice that two of the titles ask a provocative question and two others include a top 6 or top 7 list. Asking questions and creating lists are proven methods to drive interest in your articles. Even if all you change is your title and keep the content of your articles the same you could see significant changes in how many people find them and link to you.

Get Your Content Into Google

You can write the greatest content in the world but if Google doesn’t know about it, you won’t get traffic or links. If your website is not very popular then Google might only come every six months to see if you have anything new. You don’t want to wait six months for them to pick up your articles! The easiest way to get your content into Google is to use their AddURL tool.

It’s a free tool that Google created to help you add pages into their index. Simply go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ then put in your URL, type in the letters that appear in the box and press “Add URL” – you’re done!

If you’re adding many pages at a time then you might want to consider creating a sitemap of your content. This requires slightly more technical skill but it’s worth it if you are writing a lot of content and want Google to pick up all of your pages.

I’ll continue the Link Building Tactics series in the coming weeks and hope that in the meantime you focus you efforts on developing quality content that makes people want to read on, keep it to around 500 words, and tell Google as soon as you create the content so you can get indexed right away.

I’d be curious to know what piece of content got the most links for you?

In my first two posts in this series I discussed the AdSense formula $ = V x CTR x CPC and how to increase your V through search engine optimization, Twitter, and getting others to write content for you. Today I’m going to assume we’ve solved the “How do I get traffic?” problem and move on to the next part in the formula – the Click Through Rate (CTR).

Now we’re worried about getting the people who are coming to our site clicking through on our AdSense ads. All the traffic in the world won’t help you if they don’t click through on your ads.

“It might make sense logically to put it at the top because that’s where everyone else is putting it but it’s exactly that reason why you should choose a different location.”

Location, Location, Location

You’ve heard that in real estate the location of your property is the key to getting a high sale price. The same principle applies to websites and Google AdSense – the location of your ads can make a big difference in how much money goes into your wallet every month. Most people who get started with AdSense end up putting the ads in the low value areas which result in poor earnings.

Because Google only earns money through AdSense when you earn money they have provided a number of tools to help you be more successful. One of the most important ones is their Heat Map. According to Google:

“Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This “heat map” illustrates the ideal placing on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance).”

Note that the banner spots at the top of the page, bottom of the page and right side of the page are not high paying locations. This is where most websites owners who are new to AdSense will put their ad units and it might make sense logically to put ads at the top because that’s where everyone else is putting them but it’s exactly that reason why you should choose a different location.

People have “banner blindness” and are used to seeing ads at the top, for example, so they ignore it and move downwards to where they think the content will be. You can see from the Heat Map that the highest payout area is in the middle of the page within the primary content of the page – not where you would expect ads to be which is exactly the point. According to Google:

“All other things being equal, ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page. ”

What If I Run Forums?

For all you website owners with forums, Google hasn’t forgotten about you and they launched a different Heat Map specifically for you. Here is what Google has to say and what the Heat Map looks like:

“Because forum regulars tend to skip the header and go straight to the meat of the thread, placing your ad unit above or below the first post can be more effective than ads next to the logo. Place a leaderboard immediately after the last post. This provides users who make it to the end of a thread with a ‘next step’ when the content ends. Try to avoid placing it after the footer, though, as your readers will likely move to the next thread without seeing the ad. ”

What If I Have A Blog?

Finally, if you are a blogger and want to make money from AdSense, Google has two suggested layouts to choose from. See which one works best for you. Here are Google’s comments and the layouts:

“In general, wider ad formats tend to be more reader-friendly. Placing an ad unit after the first post will likely catch your readers’ attention. Take a look at our sample implementations to get some ideas. Also, consider placing a Skyscraper (120×600) or vertical link unit on the right side of your blog. ”

One of the greatest parts about running a business through AdSense is that you can quickly test different variables and see what generates the best results. Whether you have a website, forum, or blog, use these layouts as general templates to help figure out starting points for where to put your AdSense ads. Keep testing until you find the location that works best for you. Changing my ad locations was the first thing I did to optimize my AdSense and helped move me from having a website to having an online business.

In Part 4 of this series I will continue to look at how you can increase the click through rates of the AdSense units on your pages.

As always I look forward to your comments. What experience have you had with changing the location of your AdSense ad units?

Well it’s been another great day here at SES Toronto. The day started off with a keynote speach by Emanuel Rosen who is the author of The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited. The Anatomy of Buzz is a great book to help you increase your word of mouth marketing and I’ll soon be picking up the Revisited version.

Just like I did yesterday, today I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from today’s workshops. I again stayed mostly to the Geek Track to get really deep on technical issues and tactics to build more traffic. Thank you everyone for the great feedback that you left on the blog from yesterday’s post.

The first workshop that had a lasting impact for me was Information Architecture, Site Performance Tuning and SEO from the Geek Track. Shari Thurow, the founder of Omni Marketing Interactive, discussed site architecture and how to optimize it to perform as quickly as possible. It’s been mentioned a few times at the conference so far that Google will soon (if it’s not already) look at page load time as a factor in your website rankings. If your website takes a long time to load then you won’t rank as high. This is of particular concern to me because as my site has grown, it’s been taking longer and longer to load – fixing the page load time is definitely a high priority item on my task list!

One of Shari’s suggestions was monitor your broken links (are your links working?), crawlability (is your page structure too complicated for Google to follow?), and indexation (are your pages being indexed into Google?).

“It doesn’t matter if you use sub-domains or sub-directories, as long as you do it consistently – pick one and stick with it”

She also advises entrepreneurs to focus your links on what makes sense to the user. Don’t cram websites full of links to try and boost your rankings for those pages. If it doesn’t make sense for the users then the search engines won’t give you the rankings. Also make sure to make your link structure easy to remember. Use your keywords in your URL – it’s better for SEO and people can remember it!

For example, if you had an article on New York real estate you want the link to be www.domain.com/New-York-Real-Estate.html instead of www.domain.com/article.php?id=443. People are more likely to remember and tell people about the article with the keywords in it.

Finally, she discussed sub-domains versus sub-directories. For example, if it would be better to use www.EvanCarmichael.com/Marketing or marketing.EvanCarmichael.com. Her response was that it doesn’t matter if you use sub-domains or sub-directories, as long as you do it consistently – pick one and stick with it. Shari is the author of When Search Meets Web Usability and I’m looking forward to checking out her book and putting her advice to practice!

The next workshop that made an impact was my favourite from last year. It was Tool Time: The Search Marketer’s Free-to-Cheap Goodie Bag from the Nuts & Bolts track. Last year it was my favorite workshop and I was looking forward to coming back this year to cover it. The speakers went over so much information and provided so many useful tools that it was difficult to keep up! I’m going to wait for the slides to be posted to the website and will post my update here as soon as it’s up!

Making money from a website used to be extremely challenging – not only did you have to produce great content and promote it effectively, you also had to go out and find advertisers to give yourself a revenue stream to live off of.

Enter Google AdSense

Google changed the playing field for many web publishers because they went out and found you advertisers for your website. Every time your users click on one of your ads, you get paid and Google takes a commission. As Google AdSense grew to become the largest online ad network they could also find targeted advertisers who might only advertise on one of your pages but not the others because it was of specific interest to them. That kind of needle-point precision helps increase your number of clicks because it’s more targeted information and also would have been nearly impossible to manage if you had individual advertisers approaching you to place ads one page at a time.

Best of all, Google AdSense is extremely easy to install. You just have to copy and paste a few lines of code into your website template and Google takes care of the rest!

“I thought to myself “You CAN make a living from this!” Four months later, in May, I passed the $300 per day mark for the first time.”

Making Real Money From Google AdSense

Most website owners that have AdSense installed barely earn enough each day to buy a cup of coffee. When I first started in January of 2005 I was making $0.27 per day. I thought to myself “I’ll give this AdSense thing a try.” By May, as my traffic grew, so did my AdSense revenue. Suddenly I was making $1.17 per day. Unfortunately a lot of website owners never get past this stage. I thought to myself “Maybe I can do better” and delved into the world of AdSense optimization, or in other words, figuring out how to make the most from the traffic I had coming to my site. The hardest way to  make money is to increase your number of visitors. The easiest way is to make more money from the visitors that you already have.

After optimizing my AdSense and continuing to grow my business I first crossed the $100 per day mark in January of 2006. I thought to myself  “You CAN make a living from this!” Four months later, in May, I passed the $300 per day mark for the first time. The rest, as they say, is history. In this series I hope to share with you some of the tactics that worked for me and hopefully you can use them to grow your online business as well.

“Most online entrepreneurs who try AdSense get one or two of the important success factors but not all three which is why they can only buy themselves a cup of coffee per day from their AdSense earnings.”

$ = V x CTR x CPC

This is the most important formula that you need to know if you’re planning on using AdSense to make money. The money that you make ($) is equal to the number of visitors (V) that you get to your site multiplied by the click through rate (CTR) of those visitors onto the ads on your site multiplied by the cost per click (CPC) of the ads being clicked on. If you want to be able to live off of your website then you need to have traffic coming to your site, a high percentage of the visitors who come to your site clicking through on your ads, and you need to be in a niche topic where people are willing to pay a lot of money to advertise. You need all three working together to be successful. Most online entrepreneurs who try AdSense get one or two of the important success factors but not all three which is why they can only buy themselves a cup of coffee per day from their AdSense earnings.

Let’s look at the following chart to explain this important point:

You could have an extremely popular site but if it’s not optimized for AdSense and it’s not in a high paying niche then you’re only going to make pocket change from your earnings. Similarly if all you do is optimize for AdSense but don’t have many visitors and you’re in a low paying niche then you still won’t be making very much. Finally, if you are in a great niche but have low visitor numbers and don’t AdSense optimize then you’re again just going to be scraping by.

Even if you get two of these factors right you still won’t hit a big payday. For instance if you have a popular website and optimize for AdSense but it’s in a niche that doesn’t pay well then you will need to find a day job to support yourself. You’ll get the same results by picking any two of these factors.You will only break out when you can get all three working together. The reason is because each number is multiplied by one another. If you have the equation A x B x C, even if A and B are massive numbers, if C is very low, you’ll still end up with a small amount.

For information on how to increase your Visitors you should learn about search engine optimization and Twitter. In Part 2 of this series I will look at another way to dramatically increase your Visitors and then continue the series by discussing ways to maximize your CTR and CPC to help you start earning a real living from AdSense.