Posts Tagged ‘offsite SEO’

How To Really Make Money With Google Adsense

November 25th, 2008  |  by Court  |  Published in For Beginners  |  57 Comments

The other day Mark and I were laughing about how unbelievably addicting Google Adsense is. Mark had just installed Adsense on a newer site and made $3 his first day. I don’t know why but having a $3 day on a new site is sometimes more exciting than making thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars at a job. Those who have had their first $3 day on a new site know that income just keeps growing and growing if you know how to ‘feed’ it. Every five and six figure Adsense earner once started by getting their first click.

Every guide I’ve read about making money with Adsense is about the same – they tell you that all you have to do is:

  1. Put some Google ads on a web page.
  2. ‘Drive’ traffic to the web page (what does this even mean?).
  3. Sleep all day and watch the money roll in.

The problem with all of these guides is that they leave out all the important steps. They aren’t going to give you a real road map that tells you how to get the traffic. They aren’t going to tell you what types of traffic to go after. They aren’t going to tell you which niches pay. They aren’t going to give you all of the classic pitfalls that 99% of the ‘make money onlinerz’ fall into.

Making Money With Adsense Can Be Complicated

I’m going to just say it straight up – learning to make money with Google Adsense can be pretty complicated. A lot of things can go wrong and you need to learn what these things are so that you can avoid them.

I started making money with Google Adsense over four years ago and honestly, I have a pretty good grasp of the problems that you can run into. I want to outline some of the things that can get in your way, and then provide you with some of the solutions I’ve been able to come up with.

Creating A Web Page

One of the hardest parts of making Adsense money is learning how to create webpages/websites. If you’re going to make money this way, creating web pages is a necessity.

When I first started, I had to learn to create pages using HTML. This was an extremely tedious process. It took me months and hundreds of hours of work to put my first site together. I would skip this step completely.

If you’re just starting out, I would recommend first learning to create sites with Blogger. Blogger is 100% free and fairly easy to use. Many people are already using Blogger to create family type blogs and the transition into making money with it is fairly simple.

A temptation that you’re going to have when you start with Blogger is that you’re going to want to create the perfect looking sites. Don’t do this. I would pick one of the introductory templates and stick with it until you’re making a healthy income. Spending a ton of time on the look of your site won’t help with traffic and trust me, traffic will be the biggest hurdle you have to overcome.

Once you have mastered Blogger, you can start to learn how to use a similar program called WordPress. Learning WordPress will allow you to create sites on domains that you buy and this will give you a little more flexibility with your site.

There honestly isn’t a huge need to ever leave Blogger. I know a lot of people that make great money using Blogger to create sites that are monetized with Adsense.

Getting Traffic

Bringing traffic is definitely the most important skill of anyone who wants to use Adsense to make money. This isn’t exactly something that we can cover in a single article, but I want to give you the basics so that you can get started.

The most important thing you need to know about getting traffic for Adsense is that organic search traffic is the only way to go. Social traffic blows for Adsense. Social visitors won’t click on your ads and even if they do, they’re junk leads for the advertisers buying the clicks. If the people that click your ads aren’t a good fit for the advertisers, Google will pay you less (considerably less) than people who provide better leads.

People that are searching in Google for information on a certain topic are by far the best fit for Adsense ads. For example, let’s take a person that searches for ‘How To Get Student Loans’ in Google. They are probably a student that needs financial aid right? So they find your web page about ‘How To Get Student Loans’, where they find an ad that offers a good rate on a student loan and !CLICK!, you have yourself a couple bucks.

This scenario creates a win-win. The advertiser bought the right kind of visitor and you got paid for it. Social traffic on the other hand won’t be a good fit for this advertiser. Sure, some students may find your page socially, but amongst the social visitors will be mostly people that aren’t the best fit. This will lower the amount of clicks you can get from social traffic and will also be providing consistently poor leads for advertisers. This means Google is going to pay you a lot less than they will pay people that can get search traffic.

Getting organic search traffic from Google and other search engines is obviously a matter of getting ranked for keywords that people are searching for. If you come up #1 in Google for a popular keyword phrase, a lot of people are going to click into your site and they will be exactly the type of people you need.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the ‘big three’ search engines and they are getting a lot closer to each other than they used to be. Getting ranked in all three of them take the same basic strategies. You have to put the right content on the page using onsite SEO, and then work on getting links that will strengthen your rankings. Each of these search engines use links in a major way to determine which web pages are the best.

In the last four years, I have chased almost every type of traffic out there and honestly, organic search traffic is the only type that’s worthwhile if you want to make money with Adsense. If you want to get started in the search traffic game, you will probably want to read my Introduction To SEO.

Another traffic related issue that you can run into is going after the wrong keywords. If you choose the wrong keywords, they may not really be worth much. They can actually be worth nothing if they never bring you any traffic, and they can also be worth very little by way of click prices. If you’re only getting $0.01 per click, it’s going to take a load to make anything at all.

I’m not going to outline all of the concepts here, so you’re going to have to read some of the other articles I linked to to learn these concepts.

Adsense Optimization

The next problem you can run into is not getting enough people to click your Google ads. Optimizing your Adsense can be a lengthy process, but it’s almost always worthwhile. Obviously if you can get more people to click, you get paid more from the same amount of traffic. Here are the basics of how I make sure I get my Adsense properly optimized:

1. Test placement first. On every site I have, I start by first testing the placement of my ads. There are three main placements that have worked for me. The first is the 336×280 large rectangle placed above the page titles like Griz from Make Money For Beginners does. This is by far my favorite placement and usually does a great job of getting a high percentage of search visitors to click an ad. The second placement I like is the same large rectangle ad unit with the text of the page wrapping around it. The third I like is the 728×90 leaderboard stretched across the top of the page.

In order to test between these three placements, it’s very simple. You will give each placement 500 impressions worth of search traffic and you will go with the one that gets the most clicks. Yes, it’s that simple.

2. Test colors second. Once you know which placement will get the most clicks, it’s time to test colors. I usually test a few different colors, the first being the same color that your site uses for links. If your links are green, use green. If they’re blue, use blue. This generally helps the ads to blend in and that’s a good thing. After I test the matching link color, I will usually test a generic blue (color #OOOOFF). This one still works well, as it’s the color people most associate with links. I will then thirdly test a color very opposite to my site’s links. I will give each color 500 impressions and will go with the one that produces the most clicks.

The background color I go with always matches the theme exactly and I never test anything else (not that I haven’t tested different colors before – I certainly have). Matching backgrounds almost always get more clicks.

Summary

Making money with Google Adsense is simple if you can learn all of the concepts. You have to learn keyword research, onsite SEO, offsite SEO and link building, and Adsense optimization. If you can do that, you’ll do great with Adsense.

Introduction To SEO

November 17th, 2008  |  by Court  |  Published in SEO  |  25 Comments

Writing an introductory post about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is quite difficult. At best, SEO is a multi-headed beast that will take some time to learn to tame. At worst, it’s a never-ending and changing labyrinth that will leave many of you puzzled and perpetually confused.

SEO is 100% about getting your site to rank well in search engines, more specifically in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Since Google is currently taking about 65% market share in the English speaking search market, your efforts should focus there. Incidentally, Yahoo and MSN are shifting their search engines more and more to act like Google’s, so your efforts with Google will actually make a pretty large difference with the other two.

Before we dig in, let’s set the record straight. You aren’t going to learn to use SEO to create traffic in one day. You’re going to have to test and then test some more. I’ll lay out the course, but you have to do the lab work. I can’t do that for anyone.

This lesson will break down the basic concepts that you will need to learn in order to create traffic with SEO. I’m simply not going to cover stuff that doesn’t make a difference anymore, so you may notice that concepts you’ve learned in the past aren’t here. Here are the basic ideas we’re going to talk about:

Onsite Optimization

  • Optimizing HTML Titles
  • Optimizing Page Content
  • Optimized Tagging
  • Optimized Linking Within Site

Offsite Optimization

  • Basic Overview Of Offsite SEO
  • White Hat Link Building
  • Grey Hat Link Building
  • Black Hat Link Building (not recommended)

Most people I have met focus on the on-page stuff and honestly, that doesn’t do a whole lot for you. You can tweak and test your on-page optimization all year and you’ll never see much improvement.

Google puts a lot more emphasis on the links pointing to a page than they do on the content that appears on the page. In other words, a worthless page with links pointing at it is more likely to rank well than a great page with no links pointing at it. That said, great pages usually attract links so the great pages usually have more links than worthless pages and Google operates on this principle.

Onsite Optimization

This part of the puzzle is actually very easy. Follow this simple walk-through and you’ll be done with your onsite SEO. Of course, you will need to do it for each page you’re trying to optimize:

  • Make sure the keyword you want to rank for is in the HTML title tag of the page you’re trying to get to rank well. The page will rank fine if the keyword is in there by itself and it will rank well if the title also contains other words. Seriously, either way is perfectly fine – just make sure your keyword is in there.
  • Place your keyword two or three times within the content of the page you’re trying to get to rank well. If you have more than 500 words of content on the page, you can use the keyword four or five or even six times. Now, all of you detail-oriented people out there will be trying to nail down exact numbers here. Don’t. Follow the basic guidelines and that’s it.
  • Use your keyword as a tag at the end of the article. If you use WordPress or Blogger, tagging is quite easy. If you use something else, you’ll have to create tags manually. Tags are actually just links with a special piece of code on them. If you have to create them manually, here’s a Tag Generator you can use.
  • Edit some other pages of your site and create links that point at the page you’re trying to get to rank well. Use your keyword as anchor text in those links. The more links you point, the better your page will rank.

Onsite SEO isn’t rocket science. Those are the only concepts you need to know.

Offsite Optimization

Offsite optimization, or offsite SEO, is simply the optimization that happens off of your site. Search engines primarily use links to determine which pages to rank in the best locations. It’s very much a popularity contest. The pages with the most links will rank the best.

When Google finds two or more pages on the same topic, they will examine each to find out which is the most popular. The page that has the most or best links pointing at it will be chosen by Google as the best.

There are some different factors that Google uses to determine which links are the best links but this isn’t rocket science either. Links from better sites are better links. Basically, a link from your Grandma’s knitting blog won’t count for as much as a link from The Wall Street Journal would. Additionally, links from related sites will help you more than links from sites that aren’t related to yours.

Anchor text, the text that links are made out of, also affects search rankings significantly. If you get a link that uses the keyword you’re trying to rank for as anchor text, it will make more difference than a link that uses something else as the anchor text. A related anchor will help more than a unrelated anchor.

White Hat Link Building

White hat link building is the kind that Google is 100% ok with. You’re very limited in what you can do if you want to stay within what Google wants.

If you’re going to try to stay white hat, you can basically create killer stuff on your site that will get linked to naturally. It’s ok to let people know about it and it’s even ok to ask them to link to it.

With white hat, your site will only gets links that it deserves because of the content you’ve put together.

Google has also said that it’s ok to submit your site to online directories, so this is ok. However, manipulation of anchor text when you submit to directories wouldn’t be ok if you wanted to stay totally white. Google has explicitly warned against linking techniques that manipulate search rankings. To stay white, you would have to submit to directories using your site’s name as the titled anchor text.

Grey Hat Link Building

Grey hat consists of almost all of the link building the most SEOs use. Link trading, keyword-using directory submission, article distribution, and site-interlinking would all fall into the grey.

Almost everyone thinks these techniques are 100% ok but they actually aren’t. Many people get away with most of them but the honest truth is that they are definitely grey area. Google and other search engines would prefer to not see any linking techniques that manipulate search rankings and these clearly do.

Many SEOs use grey hat techniques but you will have to decide what is and isn’t worth the risk for you.

Black Hat Link Building

This is the stuff that falls way outside the guidelines set forth by Google. This is the spam-farming, comment spamming, and hacking that many black hats actively participate in. I personally would never get involved in this stuff because unless you’re very advanced, you’re more likely to get banned than you are to succeed at it.

There are still a lot of black hats making money, in fact one of my sites is currently competing against quite a few black hatters. Since this is a very bad idea for most people, I’m never going to talk about these methods and would never use any of them myself. I simply see them when I’m looking at my competition.

SEO In A Nutshell

SEO is getting the right words on the page and then building the right links to point at the page. If you’re getting out-ranked, you’re probably getting out-linked.

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