Internet Business Daily

We have arrived at part 3 of the SEO tips series. I have just a little time to write right now so I will keep this tip short and sweet. Many people ask “how do I get indexed in the first place?” Well there are 2 main ways I let Google and other search engines know that I have a new site (or new content) for them to come spider.

Blue Hat SEO Quick Index Tool
The first tool I use is from Blue Hat SEO. All you gotta do is enter your domain address and a day later your site will be indexed. This is the quickest tool I have seen to get your site indexed by search engines. The quick index tool can be found here.

Pingoat Pinging Service
The second tool I use is pingoat. This service pings dozens of sites telling them to come check you out, which eventually translates into Google coming to spider your site.

Both of these tools are very useful and can be used very often (or as often as you update content).

Google’s Domination Continues
I was very excited today to see that the company I work for had been selected to join Google’s New Video Distribution and Sponsorship Pilot. This is the second step in a process that will make Google the king of all Internet video the way they dominate contextual advertising. The first thing I noticed was the new option in my adsense account. Here is what it looks like:

This was what I saw on the Adsense setup screen. Upon clicking this, I was taken to a page where a list of channels could be selected. These channels include clips from music, entertainment, finance, lifestyle, and sports categories.

How It Works
How it works is very interesting. Basically a publisher (like me) comes along and decides they want to try this program out. The first thing I do is select a channel that I feel would best integrate into my site. Since my blog is about Internet Business, I would probably choose something like the Wall Street Journal channel. I then grab the ad code just like their contextual ads and place it anywhere on my site. A (brand-new) Google video play is embedded into my page and that’s all from my end!

Now that the video player is embedded into my page, all someone needs to do is start watching. The video player only starts buffering when someone clicks play, but it shuffles through frames to entice the clicks. When someone clicks play is where the fun begins. The videos (yes multiple videos) load up in a play list and start playing. When one video finishes, an ad is automatically put in between that video and the next to be played. The easiest way to describe this is like a television channel. The videos continue to play until you leave the page or press pause, with ads between each video.

What About Revenue?
Of course no one (atleast no one wanting to make money) would put Google’s video player on their site without the promise of big bucks, and Google fully understands this. They have devised a rather brilliant system to pay the three parties involved with these videos. The publisher gets paid each time someone views an ad, even if they don’t view the entire ad. This means they will have to click play on a video and watch the entire thing, then when the ad loads up the publisher gets paid. As for the content provider (video creator), they get paid for each time their video is viewed. And last but not least, Google takes their nice little cut at the end. So it looks like everyone is happy.

This Is Only A Test
This pilot will only be running for 1 month and ends March 8th, so it’s ending pretty soon. I was late to find out about it but will try to implement the video player into one of my companies sites before the end date. I will report back to everyone on how the player is doing in terms of revenue.

This is part 3 of my Agloco updates. It all started with a post about Agloco. You can find the other two updates here (part 1) and here (part 2). You can still sign up for Agloco here if you haven’t already.

300 Signups
I have finally reached over 300 Agloco signups. I still barely have any new direct referrals, but as you can see it only takes one strong direct referral to get you many indirects. To be perfectly honest with everyone, I have no idea if this will actually convert into income for me. The best part about promoting Agloco and the Agloco Viewbar is that it costs me no money, I just blog about it every once in a while. Since it costs no money, everyone should be making the little effort it takes to sign people up.

Agloco Viewbar
I still am not sure when the Agloco Viewbar will be released, but it should be very soon. When the Viewbar is released, ill keep everyone updated on how it is doing for me and for its users. People using the Viewbar will appreciate two things: there is a tiny ad window to actually view, and you will be getting paid to view it and surf the net! If you already surf the net (which you obviously do by coming to my page), then there is no reason not to like using this.

Post Ratings
I just added a new feature to this blog. It is late at night, about 2am and I have nothing better to do than find cool Wordpress plugins. Anyways the new addition is called Post Ratings, which can be found here. As you can see it puts a little Ajax-style rating system at the bottom of each post. I think it looks great and adds even more of a community feeling to the site. I’m definitely giving this post a 5 star rating!

Download the Wordpress plugin here, and read the install guide here.

Users Online
The second plugin I installed was Users Online. It can be found on the same page as the link above. All it does is add a sidebar widget that displays the number of users currently browsing your site. Both of these plugins are very nice and do not make the site too cluttered.

Today is a very good day for some people, including John Chow. Many people who were previously banned from Digg are now allowed back! Of course everyone took advantage of this right away. The first to do so was JC (because he is EVIL). John had a story on the front page of Digg within 15 minutes of finding out he was unbanned. It is very funny to see how easy it is to play Digg’s system. All you need is a popular person (John Chow) to get many of his followers to digg his story and poof, front page story that easy.

Hopefully one day ill grow a following such as other people have done, and that way I can have my stories hit the front page any time I want as well. Digg still has a lot of work to do in terms of stopping things like this. They are far from a democratic system, it reminds me of high school elections where the most popular kid always wins. Come on Kevin, get with the program.

The Basics
This is the second installment of my SEO Tips series (you can find SEO Tips (Part 1) here). I think I may have jumped the gun with my last post by not going over the basics first, such as research. Research to me is by far the most important part of SEO.

Good Research = Good SEO
How can you have good search engine optimization without knowing which keywords to use. If you just guess which keywords people use to find your site, most of the time you will not be correct. There are a few factors to think about when doing research, such as 1) what people think of when they try to find your site 2) what keywords people are actually using to find your site 3) what keywords to target that have the right amount of competition. There are many different tools offered to discover this information, but I have been having much luck with only two. The first tool I like to use is the inventory tool by Yahoo, which can be found at inventory.overture.com. This tool allows you to see how many times a certain search term was searched for in the previous month. You don’t want to target a keyword that has 40,000 searches in a month, because most likely there will be too much competition for that word and therefore you will not win it.

The second keyword research tool I use is Google’s Keyword External Tool. This gives the amount of searches and advertiser competition for any keyword you enter. The best part about this tool is if you are not sure about what keyword to select, it gives you many you can try based on a common keyword you enter. I suggest playing around with both of these tools until you gain an understanding of how to use them.

Choosing Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is as important as anything else in SEO. You have to decide which words you think describe your site the best with regards to both Google’s spider, and your users. If you have a movie site, just using the keyword “movies” wont really work because there may be too much competition. If you have a movie site and one of the pages is horror movies, any keywords having to do with scary movies, horror movies, or something similar would work.

I think this may be enough information for now. Try out what you have learned here and just play around with the keyword selection tools, they are a great help.

In my last post I mentioned that I had added a little eBay button on the right side of this site, which is part of their affiliate program. I decided to change the site up a little more and add a 468×60 eBay banner to the top of all pages. I really want to promote this campaign so what better way to do it than to blog about it. Every time someone clicks on the eBay banner or button and buys something from eBay, I get a percentage of the commission. This may be a good or bad thing. Let’s say for example someone comes to this site and clicks the affiliate marketing eBay banner, and they buy an mp3 player for $500. eBay’s commission on this item depends on what it was listed for, but let’s just say their commission is $10 and my percentage is 40%, I would receive $4 for one single click!

Obviously the conversion rate is not very high in terms people actually buying something from eBay, but if just one person buys an expensive toy, I get paid a large amount. I am just testing out eBay affiliate marketing program, and I will have future updates on how it is doing. I am thinking about rotating between the 468×60 Google Adsense ad and eBay’s ad, does anyone have any thoughts on that? What do people think about the new banner? Updates to this post will come soon.

WordPress 2.1
There are a couple of things that I would like to point out that are new on this site. I finally got around to upgrading to WordPress 2.1. I thought there was going to be many errors and custom coding to get all my plugins to work, but luckily it was pretty painless. The only thing that did not work was Subscribe to Comments, but the creator came up with an upgrade: Subscribe to Comments 2.1 and now everything works great.

Wordpress 2.1 includes a whole bunch of upgrades, and some of them have really made my life easier. One of my favorite upgrades is an auto save feature when writing a post. It automatically stores a copy every minute of what you have written so far just in case the page accidentally closes. I remember when I first started writing this blog that a very long post that I had just written got deleted for this very reason, I’m glad they have addressed this issue. There are many other little changes that I have not gotten around to trying.

Site Changes
I have made a few changes to the website itself. The most obvious change is the header image. I decided I was a little tired of the one I had on before and photoshopped a photo I took a few months ago. The picture is of Westcliff, which is in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is where I went to college and I absolutely love the town, and for obvious reasons. It is one of the most beautiful places I have been to. I also thought this picture blends better with my site theme colors.

eBay! Button
I have just joined the ebay affiliate program, which is why I have the little eBay button on the right. When people click on that button and buy something from eBay, I get a portion of the commission. I have been told that some of the top bloggers make the most money not from Adsense, but from the eBay affiliate program. So I decided to try my hand at it.

So those are the little changes I have made to the site. I want to make sure I provide a quality experience for my readers so if anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to let me know. Stay tuned for updates on my business ventures!

I have been doing a whole lot of research on SEO for the past month or so. I still know nothing compared to many of the SEO experts out there but I am starting to see the big picture. I decided I would create a new segment on this blog called SEO Tips. Each post I will write about one or two new tips that I have learned.

What Is SEO?
Before going too far, let me explain what SEO is. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the practice of making your site easier to “read” by the search engines (mainly Google, Yahoo, and MSN). I will also be refering to Google in this post but all the tips apply to any search engine. What I mean by easier to read is when Google’s spider (the computer used to find your site) comes around to your site to index it (take note it exists), you want to make it as easy as possible for that spider to read every page in your website. The more pages Google sees and indexes of yours, the more chance someone will find it when they do a Google search. More searches equals more traffic, more traffic equals more money and bla bla bla you know the rest.

The First Tip
I could go on for a while talking about what exactly SEO is and what keywords are, but you are better off reading all about it at a site like SEOchat.com. Let’s just go ahead and start with the first tip. As you have probably noticed, I changed the title of my blog that appears in your browser’s window. Before it just said “Internet Business Daily,” but it now includes the keyword I have targeted that best describes my site: “make money online.” By doing this I am describing to Google (and my readers) what my site is about. When people search for make money online now they will find my site. Although it’s not exactly that easy, that is the basic principle of it.

For Next Time…
So you are going to want to find which keyword(s) best describe your site and use them in your header title. I will explain more about choosing keywords and how to place them on your site in coming parts of this segment, so look out for my next installment.