SEO Tips & Information

There are a number of ways of monetizing a website. One way is to place ads on the site, e.g. Google Adwords and get paid for every ad click. Another way is to become an affiliate selling other people’s products. If you know how to do SEO and can get traffic to a website, becoming an affiliate can be a relatively easy way to make some money. All the product development and any support still belongs to the original product creator, all you do is get paid a percentage of any product sale you send their way.

The usual way that affiliate schemes work is through tracking cookies. If you place an affiliate link on your website then whenever someone clicks on that link and follows through to the target website, a cookie gets placed on their PC. The user may then download the product - e-book, software package or whatever - and should they then purchase, the cookie will be used to credit you with a percentage of the sales price. Most schemes place a minimum payout limit, say $50, before they issue a check or make a PayPal payment to you. And often, most schemes will only pay out a maximum of once a month.

One recommendation for an affiliate scheme is the SliQ Submitter affiliate scheme. These guys pay 35% commission on all sales you generate for both SliQ Submitter Plus and Lite. If you have a site about SEO, you can easily place an affiliate link and hope to start making some commission on sales. SliQ Submitter V2 is a high speed directory submitter - much faster than even V1 - and hooks into the Decaptcher and Death By Captcha online services to provide fully automatic directory submission options. Two licenses are available - $24.99 for a 3 month license and $49.99 for a one year license. The $24.99 license is particularly cost-effective as it allows you to submit as many websites as you like for 3 months - some other submitters charge a similar amount to submit a single website.

General SEO

Since the Google Panda update, traffic on my network of software sites has dropped by a factor of 3. Whereas once I was getting upwards of 10,000 page views a day, I’m now averaging under 3000. Adsense has been badly hit. Once upon a time I was earning enough to pay the mortgage, now I can barely afford a pizza a week.

By their very nature, PAD sites contain a lot of content that is identical to that on other sites. There are hundreds of PAD-enabled websites and the content on a lot of these sites is identical. I used to spend a lot of time filtering spam and writing backend admin software to help me remove submissions I didn’t like or that were obviously looking to get keyword-based backlinks. Typically, only 10% of submissions would make it live on my sites. Even with all this work though, the content was still the same as on 99% of the other PAD sites out there.

Even worse, the Adsense income has dropped by a greater proportion than the traffic. It’s as though Google doesn’t want to give my sites high paying ads anymore. I’ve got a few friends who run PAD sites too and they’ve been seeing the same drop in traffic and income. We’ve all been scratching our heads to see how we might recover. Writing unique content isn’t an option - we’d never get paid back for the amount of work required.

One thing I have noticed is that a new site I’ve been working on for a year has started to do much better in SERPs even though I’ve built almost no links for it. There’s only one difference between this PAD site and the others though - the site has no Adsense. With my other sites, I took great care to put as many Adsense ads on each page as I could, as well as to optimize the layout of the ads to increase the clickthrough rate. I’m guessing that Google may have hit MFA sites harder than most in the Panda update, so I’m going to remove two thirds of the ads and see if the traffic improves. Hopefully, if the traffic improves I may get more clicks on the remaining ads.

Adsense Optimisation, General SEO

For ages, ever since I’ve been using Google Analytics, I’ve been waiting until midnight has passed to check the visitor stats for the previous day. Now I’ve found that I can get real-time stats from Google Analytics. To see visitor stats for the current day, go to your Google Analytics account and just click on the date range combo in the Dashboard for your site. Then click on today’s date - the Analytics then switches to show the stats - visitor count, page views and so on - for today. Hee’s a picture of what I mean:

Switching on Google Analytics Real-Time Stats

The statistics shown aren’t quite real-time - there seems to be a one or two hour delay between updates to the stats shown. However, if your site is like mine and most visits occur during normal business hours, you can get a pretty good picture of how many visitors you’ve had by the end of the working day.

General SEO, Wordpress SEO Tips

With the latest release, SliQ Submitter Plus got even quicker at making directory submissions. The new V2 of my favourite directory submitter is 3 or 4 times as quick as V1 and I’ve managed to submit to over 2000 directories in less than an hour.

V2 of SliQ Submitter Plus also lets you add your own directories for use in the Fast Submitter mode. This means you can add directories and submit to them in fully automatic submission mode. So even if you don’t like the 2000 or so directories supplied with SliQ you can scrape your own set of directory URLs and add them to the software. I found that about 20% of the directories I added were compatible with the Fast submitter, with a good deal more being compatible with the standard, semi-automatic submitter in SliQ Plus.

V2 also supports spinning syntax in titles and descriptions - so you can put titles like “directory { submitter | submission software | submission package } and SliQ will spin the titles automatically as it submits.

I’ve also been keeping track of how I perform for the keywords I use when submitting. If a keyword is low competition then directory submissions work a treat - for these keywords I can move pages from nowhere to page 2 and sometimes even page 1 of Google. For high competition keywords, e.g. free software, directory submission don’t appear to have an effect. If I submit with a good set of long tail keywords, I often see a good increase in visitors over the following weeks. It often doesn’t take many submissions or approvals to make a difference.

For more info, visit sliqsubmitter.com.

Link-building

In the latest release SliQ Submitter Plus has made directory submission even easier. Decaptcher support has been added for automatic captcha decoding saving loads of time. After making a few submissions so SliQ can learn which categories you want to use, you can turn on the AutoSubmit option and leave SliQ to work its way through the 2200 directories it supports.

The automatic submission speed depends on how quick Decaptcher is operating - I was getting a submission every 10 seconds or so - but at least I no longer had to click Submit for each directory. Instead I left the automatic directory submitter running and went and did something else more interesting. I also turned on the AutoSkip feature so SliQ would carry on past any directories where it couldn’t find an exact match for the categories I had selected. After coming back later, SliQ had skipped over about 10% of the directories. All I had to do then was reset these to Not Visited (there’s a button to reset all skipped directories in the toolbar) then use the fast semi-auto interface to submit again. For some of the directories there was no suitable category so I ended up skipping them again.

I have a few sites in a similar niche so these need to be submitted to the same directory categories. SliQ lets you save and import categories between website definitions. This made submitting for my second and third site even quicker since I didn’t have to semi-auto submit to anything in order to make SliQ learn categories - I could just reuse the definitions from my first site.

I’d like to see the option to use more captcha decoding services - like an option to use bypasscaptcha as well as decaptcher. Being able to spin content would also be neat - even though you can enter an unlimited number of titles and descriptions for sites - but all in all SliQ is a very capable directory submitter.

To download, visit the SliQ Submitter site.

General SEO

Some new features have been added to SliQ Submitter Plus making it faster to submit to directories. SliQ is still a semi-automatic submitter and doesn’t crack captchas for you but it can submit on auto-pilot to several hundred directories.

Of course, with any directory submitter, you get out of the exercise what you put in so it’s better if you feed in a number of variations of website title and description before asking SliQ to automate further submissions. When it comes to matching categories, SliQ doesn’t make guesses - it only submits to categories that you’ve specifically chosen in the past - so before you switch on the auto option you need to make a few submissions in non-auto mode to let SliQ learn which directory categories you think are relevant.

Another neat feature that’s been added is the capability to export and import directory categories, so now you can share category selections between similar websites allowing you to switch into auto mode from the beginning of submission for a new site.

When the auto mode is switched on, SliQ will pasue if it comes across a directory with a captcha or where it can’t match a category - if you click the Skip checkbox on the fast submitter interface however, SliQ will ignore the directory and move on to the next. Choosing Auto and Skip lets you leave SliQ running while you go and do something else. At the end of the submission run, you can then flip all the skipped directories back to not visited status and go through them in non-auto mode.

Using the new auto mode, I managed to get about 500 submissions in an hour but I’ve only got a 1MB broadband connection. With a faster connection the submit time should go down towards the advertised submission every couple of seconds.

SliQ Submitter can be downloaded from http://www.sliqsubmitter.com.

Uncategorized

In the last few days, a new version of SliQ Submitter has been released that speeds up submission.

SliQ Submitter has always been a pretty good directory submitter. For a year or so it was free to use, then it switched to asking for payment. In the last few days though, sliqsubmitter.com has made two versions available. The existing SliQ Submitter 2009 has been updated and renamed SliQ Submitter Lite and a new SliQ Submitter Plus version has been launched. SliQ Submitter Plus includes a fast submission interface that works a lot like DigiXmas:

fast directory submitter interface

You can try the tool out for free and make 100 submissions. Having given the trial a go I managed to submit to 100 directories in less than 10 minutes. When you start SliQ Submitter Plus, a wizard prompts you to enter your website details - URL, description, title etc. Then you press the Fast button and the directory submission interface launches. All you need to do then is pick a directory category and press the Submit button (or press the F9 shortcut key). SliQ Submitter learns the categories you pick and will automatically select a category in a directory if it matches one you’ve used before. After 5 or so submissions, it pretty much always finds a match.

Semi automatic directory submitter

Here’s a list of the features I liked:-

1. SliQ learns the directory categories you select and always picks the deepest it can find when you next submit.
2. As you submit, the tool records the submission status (success/ failure/ skipped) in its directory list.
3. You can edit descriptions and titles as you submit and SliQ will record your additions/ changes.
4. If the directory submissions succeeds, the anchor text submitted is recorded.
5. If a directory submission fails it tries to capture the failure reason. 
6. When a directory submission fails, SliQ Captures a screenshot of the submission page which you can view by right-clicking on the directory.
7. SliQ sorts the directories into fastest submission order - High to Low PR with no captcha, followed by High to Low PR with captcha.

There is still work to be done on the new SliQ Submitter. It would be good to export submission stats to a PDF as well as Excel for example, and it would be useful to be able to decode captchas automatically to further speed up submission but all in all its a good, fast submitter.

Download SliQ Submitter Plus from the original site: http://www.sliqsubmitter.com.

Uncategorized

Trading links with other websites can still be a help in boosting the performance of a website. One way links are best but a link exchange can still be good. I tend to think of a good link exchange as an insurance policy. If the links to my sites fall away it’s likely my link partners will still pass me good link juice - a kind of safety in numbers thing.

If you’re going to trade links with another site there are a few things to look out for. Personally, I never feel comfortable about doing a link exchange unless I’m getting a fair deal at the time of the exchange. I also like to feel confident the value of the link I get won’t drop off over time. For these reasons I always do some research on a potential link partner before doing a trade. Here are the main things I look for:-

Check the backlinks make the PageRank believable

Does the PageRank of the site match the number of backlinks the site has? Examine the site’s backlinks using Yahoo SiteExplorer. Got to www.yahoo.com and type in link: followed by the domain you want to check, e.g.

link:www.dowebseo.com

If the site has a PR of 4 and only 2 links, the odds are the PageRank shown on the Google toolbar is out of date and the real PR of the site is a lot less.

What share of the available link juice will you get?

How many other outgoing links are there on the webpage you’ll get a link from? Are there loads of links in the sidebar/ blogroll and footer? I never trade with a site that has more than 10 outgoing links on its homepage and unless the site has PR > 5, I like to see less than 5 links. If the page is PR 3 and there are 50 outgoing links, you aren’t going to get a lot of link juice passed your way.

Does the site have unique content that will turn up in searches?

Check if the site contains content duplicated on other sites. Take a few phrases from the site and do a search for them on Google. Place the phrases in double quotes when doing a search, e.g.

"this is the phrase to search for"

If the phrase turns up on a number of sites, the content is copied and the site is not a good candidate for a link exchange.

Does the website look a bit shady?

Does the name of the domain match the theme of the content? For example if the domain name is pet-food related but the site contains reviews of gadgets like mobile phone’s stay away. It’s likely the site is a dropped domain and the value of any backlinks it has are likely to be discounted by Google.

Does the site look like it sells links?

Does the site contain other outgoing links to unrelated sites on different themes? If it does then the site may be selling links rather than gathering quality link exchanges. The value of any link from the site might be devalued by Google.

There are other things you can look out for but I’ll go into these in a later blogpost. Following the 5 tips above is a quick way to spot the majority of bad link partners.

General SEO, Link-building

Back a while ago I wrote about a simple way to find dofollow blogs. The method I recommended showed how to find blogs that were part of the “u comment I follow” movement. Recently I’ve come across another set of SEO tips on how to find blogs to comment on. This method lets you find blogs with a specific domain extension, e.g. .gov or .edu. These blogs are usually thought to be more valuable than .com sites since Google reputedly puts more trust in links from .gov or .edu sites.

Finding .gov or .edu blogs is really easy. All you need do is use the site: operator in the Google search box.

For example, to find blogs on .gov sites:

site:.gov inurl:blog

or blogs on .edu sites:

site:.edu inurl:blog

Of course visiting blogs found using the above method doesn’t mean the blog is necessarily dofollow. to make spotting dofollow blogs easier, I’d recommend using the FireFox browser and installing the NoDoFollow plugin. This plugin highlights nofollow/ dofollow links on a web page and will help you pin down possible linking opportunities.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687

Happy blog hunting!

General SEO, Link-building

When you want to boost the performance of your website in SERPs, you need to get backlinks. Submitting to directories is one of the easiest ways of building links. Backlinks from directories aren’t normally the strongest types of backlink you can get but directory submission beats most other forms of link-building for its shear ease.

Often the recommended route for making submissions is to do it manually. Make a post on a webmaster forums asking for advice on directory submission and you’ll probably get a ton of responses saying that the manual way is the best. Trouble is, no-one every says what they really mean by doing it manually. Really, what people advise when the recommend submitting manually to directories is:-

Make sure you submit your site details to the most appropriate category in the directory

If you don’t submit your site to the most appropriate category, two things are likely to happen:-

1. The directory owner will be more likely to reject the submission as spam.
2. Since your website details are out of context the worth of your backlink will diminish.

The problem with using fully automatic directory submitter tools to do submissions is that your relying on the tool choosing the categories for you. You’ll save a load of time and make hundreds of submissions but you’ll never really be confident that the submissions end up in the best categories.

There’s a similar issue with paying someone else to do manual submissions for you. How do you know they’ll pick the best categories? A lot of times you’ll find people offering to do 1000 manual submissions for $10 or so. These prices are so low they make me suspicious - that’s 1 cent per directory! People must value their time very low to be able to run such a service. Are they really just running a fully automatic submission program?

The best method for Directory Submission

If you want to be sure that the directory submissions are done correctly, the best way is to do them yourself. You can still use a software package to help though - a semi-automatic directory submission software package.

Semi-automatic packages load up directories and prefill the submission form with your website details BUT unlike fully automatic packages they let you verify the selected directory category before making the submission. You save time but can still ensure quality submissions.

One of the best semi-automatic directory submitter packages I’ve come across is SliQ Submitter. This neat, easy to use package lets you submit to over a 1000 directories. The package costs $10 for 3 months use. If you want to use the package for longer you just pay another $10. For your $10 you get to submit details for as many websites as you like and you get updated directories download automatically from the SliQ Submitter website.

For more information on directory submission, see Directory Submission SEO Tips.

General SEO