Page rank may not be the ‘be all and end all’ of a websites success, but it is undoubtedly relevant, and can help leverage valuable link sales to help supliment your income. Therefore it makes an increased PR for your website a valuable commodity!
So how do I increase my page rank for free? Well to start with I have a complex spiderweb of site links between the sites I own, but each of those needs to gain PR somehow too, and I have three very simple steps to do that!
Link Exchanges - Every day I scour the internet for websites in similair genres to my own sites and offer link exchanges to high PR sites. I can have hundreds of rejections, but the few that come through make it more than worthwhile.
Directory Submission - I am not talking about submitting to every directory I can find here. Directory submission should only be to high quality submission websites such as DMOZ and more specific directories such as the one on my site My Vegan Planet. These targeted directory submissions can help improve your PR and SERPs quickly and easily, as well as offering some great site advertisement!
Article Sites - Whether its Hubpages, Squidoo or EZine Articles, these pages can get anything from PR1 to PR6, and all of them will feed traffic to your sites!
So there you have it, my three basic steps to increasing the page rank of my websites without spending a penny!
Tags: Uncategorized
In my earlier post I announced the new that I had handed in my notice at my day job to move to America and become a full time freelancer. my last day will be the 24th of April and I have to admit that I am just a little nervous!
In the next couple of weeks I need to create articles stretching one month into the future on all my websites, since it is unlikely my new place will have any internet access, I have to inform all my clients that I will be out of action for a month and somewhere between all that I need to actually pack up my stuff and move over to America as well!
Don’t get me wrong though, I am hugely excited by the prospect of my impending future, I have always like excitement travelling and risk, I think quitting my job during a recession, leaving the country and leaving fish and chips behind pretty much covers those three points!
When i first decided to quit my day job to become a full time freelance writer and website manager it seemed like a dim and distant prospect in the future, now however the date is heading towards me like an electric train, swiftly, silently but hopefully not deadly.
Wish me luck.
Tags: Freelance · Misc · Personal News · Work For Yourself · Writing
March 23rd, 2009 · 1 Comment
Link building is a technique employed by many webmasters to promote their website, increase search engine visibility and increase their Google Page Rank (PR). Link building definitely contains a huge amount of benefits, but it does come with some draw backs that the unwary should keep an eye out for!
But first things first, if you are new to link building there are several different kinds of links that you should be looking to obtain! Be warned though, Google has been known to blacklist websites that buy or sell links!
One Way Links - One way links are the most valuable kind of link you can gain, especially if they are organic (Not paid for) and generated solely by people interested in your content.
One way links can also be bought and sold on sites such as the Digital Sales Forum or Digital Point!
Reciprocal Linking - Reciprocal links are usually formed with link exchanges between sites of similar page rank. Sometimes you may pay a subsidy to form a reciprocal link with a site that his a higher PR.
Three Way Linking (a, b, c linking) - Google has cottoned on to reciprocal linking, for this reason sites with large amounts of reciprocal, or suspected purchased links, may be penalized This is where three way, or a-b-c linking comes into play.
This kind of linking creates a link network between three different sites, usually between two owners.
Say for instance Owner 1 has two websites, a and c. Owner 2 has one website, site b.
Owner 1 could link site a to site b, in return Owner 2 would in return link site b to site c.
Four Way Linking - This is similar to Three Way linking except it can be much more complex. Four way linking can provide a wide selection of one way links to each of the fours sites!
Link Networks - In some situations you may partner with another webmaster with a network of sites similar to your own. With these kinds of link partners you could have a near unlimited number of link partners.
You can get some websites which arrange these link networks, many of these have now been black listed by Google though!
The other downside to participating in these networks is the complexity and organisation required to keep everything up to date.
Choose your Link Building Partners Carefully.
When you first start link building you may get stung a few times by people scoring free links off people. Unfortunately this never stops but you may become a little better at spotting the fraudsters from the legit link traders.
There are three techniques that fraudsters regularly use to scam links off you
The first, simpler to spot scam is when people put your link up, put a link up to you, then after a week or two delete your link. This can be avoided by some kinds of Link Management Software
The second, harder to spot scammers technique is where you are offered a three way link exchange. You will be offered a high pr link in exchange for you lining to a lower PR site.
The high PR site generally has been bought or stolen however, and you will often find the pr dropping to PR0 within weeks. These deals often sound too good to be true, and often are just that.
The third and final scam is a simple one to spot, but often overlooked. Always check the source code of a site you have made a link exchange with. Ensure that the link does not have the nofollow attribute attached to it. If the link has nofollow then you will not receive the PR benefit from this link!
Site Value & Outgoing Links
When you are looking for link partners you have to remember that links from some sites have a ‘lower’ value than others in Google’s algorithm. Also remember that to increase your own page rank you should be looking to link with sites that have a greater PR than your own!
The two factors used in Google’s algorithm to determine page rank are Site Value and Outgoing Links. Outgoing links is rather self explanatory. The more outgoing links there are, the less PR you will get from the link to your site. Be warned this can go into the negatives, at which point it will adversely effect your page rank!
Site quality is much more complex, but spam content, duplicate content and poor English content will lower this score. While this will not go into the negatives a poor quality PR8 link could be worth a tenth of a PR1 link.
For this reason you must closely investigate both these factors of any website you are preparing to link with to ensure you are getting value for the trade.
Social Bookmarking Links
Social Bookmarking can be a great way to improve traffic over a short period. Unfortunately the traffic is generally poor quality and gives low conversions. The links from social bookmarking sites are also, for the most part, no follow. This means you get no PR from these sites
Promoting social bookmarking on your site is, despite my outlook, not a bad thing. While it takes time to do it yourself if you can get your visitors to do the bookmarking for you it can create a steady flow of free organic traffic to your site. This will increase your income and site value, if only by a small amount.
You do also get, on occasions, what has become known as the Digg effect.
The Digg effect can increase visitors to your website a thousand-fold. It basically occurs when one of your stories hits the front page of a major social networking site. This instantly gives you an insane amount of traffic.
The pro’s of this are more traffic, profits and exposure.
The downside is if your server cannot handle the traffic, or your provider limits you, then your account may be suspended for a day for breaking the fair usage policy.
The Difference Between Do Follow and No Follow
In any link you create you can add a tag to the HTML called ‘ref’. This attribute is an integral part of link creation, and there are a wide range of values that can be attached to this attribute.
Most of them however hold no interest to us, except that is, no follow. Just to clarify, a Do Follow link would be a link with no ‘rel’ attribute
No Follow basically means that Google will not pay attention to the link. This means that your site will not get PR for the link and Google will not crawl your pages through the link. For this reason No Follow links are of significantly lower value than do-follow links, and rarely used by webmasters other than in comments sections on their websites.
Putting your Link on Do Follow Forums and Blogs
Putting your link on do follow forums, or even on comments in do follow blogs, can be a great free way to increase your own websites PR.
Do follow blogs and forums exist in nearly every niche on the internet, remember to check for quality however, as many of these are spammed to hell, have a 0PR themselves and have next to no quality material on them!
Tags: Uncategorized
February 25th, 2009 · 1 Comment
After several years in and out of the freelance writing, SEO and website management career have finally decided to take the fateful step. At the end of April I will become a full time freelance writer. I have handed in my notice at my day job, have packed my bags and will be travelling a little bit, first stop being Austin, Texas.
It’s a strange feeling throwing everything you are trained to think away. from birth we are programmed ot believe that working for other people is the right thing to do, that you should slave away for a miniscule wage. Yet some of us rebel, we decide to do what we want, and a lot of us are successful doing it!
So please, wish me luck, for in 2 months I will be starting the long hard road to complete financial independance through my writing!
Tags: Personal News · Work For Yourself
The G.E.I. method is something that I have stuck by throughout my progression with my work.
G.E.I. stands for
Growth
Expansion
Improvement.
So what do I mean by these?
Well it’s fairly simple.
Growth = Increase Profit
Expansion = Diversify Profit
Improvement - Protect Profit
By following these three basic principals you should see yourself actively increasing your portfolio, making sure it is proof against market fluctuations and constantly being updated to keep search engines and readers interested in your content.
But before I jump ahead showing how to use these principles to make a good amount of money for yourself, lets cover the basics, what these phrases actually mean!
Growth - Increase Profit
Growth is an important part of any business, especially in the fast moving internet world. Increasing your presence in a niche you found to be profitable is key to making the most of a good thing.
To increase your presence you must grow your websites to cover the angles, increase the content to keep up to date, increase the visitor return rate and invest in new sites on the same topic to spread your influence on the particular niche.
Growth is about expanding on what you know, were you are and what niches you are into..
Expansion - Diversify Your Profit.
Once you have one successful niche you will no doubt have the taste for more, and infact you should have the taste for more!
Diversifying across different niches and categories does carry risk, but its rewards are so much greater than anything you would ever lose (with care of course). Diversifying into different areas protects you, in case one niche begins to fail. It massively increases potential income and after all if you keep building in one particular niche for too long you will only be competing with yourself!
Diversifying is an integral part to becoming a successful internet entrepreneur, it increases profits while reducing risk, which not surprisingly is exactly what you should be aiming for in any business.
Improvement - Protect Your Profi
Improving your websites is an essential part to running an effective website management campaign. Without care and attention, regular updates and modifications it is more than likely your site will begin to lose visitors and therefore profit.
Improving your website is not about creating content in new areas, it is about solidifying and expanding on subjects integral to your website to ensure you maintain a strong traffic flow for your websites core key words.
Successful improvement should ensure that your site contains relevant up to date information on your topic, new articles covering your niche and regular updates on existing articles to ensure content remains accurate and relevant to search queries.
So how will the Growth, Expansion and Improvement program help make my website a success?
Quite simply by doing what the search engines want you to!
All the major search engines are looking for expanding website networks with fresh, none spam, useful, accurate and up to date information. By catering to what the search engines want you will line yourself up to receive large amounts of organic (Free!) search engine traffic. Since the traffic you receive will be targeted you can expect your websites to receive high click through rates, related non spam comments and relevant one way links to your website.
Maybe however I have been a little too simplistic in my descriptions of these three core components to becoming a successful web entrepreneur. These three sections may be simple to describe, but actually following through and working all this for success is an incredibly difficult and challenging role. When you want to make money online and increase traffic to your websites you really will have to work hard and concentrate on maintaining all aspects of the G.E.I marketing strategy.
So lets look a little bit further into each of these three essential web marketing areas.
Growth
To any aspiring profit making webmaster it soon becomes apparent that Growth is important to your future. The more websites you have, the more content they have and the more concise your websites are is the most heavily weighed factor on the visitors, and therefore profit, from your website.
Growth focuses on growing your web presence in a particular niche, so for instance a website on cats may grow by creating new sections for particular breeds, maybe adding a diet function.
Growth is a great way to increase profits, quite simply because it uses the existing strength of your website to instantly start earning from new micro niches on your topic. By doing this the search engines will quickly pick up on your related content and give it similar rankings on search engines. This will allow you to gain instant traffic boosts to your website!
This may seem blatantly obvious but you would be surprised how many new webmasters fail to capitalize on a websites success by growing their websites.
The best way to grow your website is to choose closely related topics or micro niches to expand the possible areas you can draw visitors from.
Expansion
Once you have successfully grown one website you should look to protect your income by building more websites. This in itself comes into two major categories
Related Expansion and Non Related Expansion
Related Expansion usually focuses on building related websites, traffic feed sites and the like to create a network of strong related sites.
Non Related Expansion is the choosing of an entirely new niche area to help ensure that you never have periods with no money coming in. This is especially true of sites based on topics such as celebrities.
Related Expansion
Related expansion is a great way to secure your position and income in one particular niche. This can be done by creating several micro niche sites and linking them through to your main niche site, or creating feeder sites which have the sole goal of directing traffic towards your website.
Feeder Sites are usually quick to set up, cheap or free and will be designed to bring in a constant flow of traffic from a myriad of different related keywords.
Having related Micro Niche sites linking through to each other and to your main niche site gives you a strong network of money making sites, each designed to inform and entertain visitors with the possible bonus of forwarding them to your main niche website. When creating these it is important not to neglect your main site, and you should be prepared to put in a lot of work to maintain these websites.
Related Expansion can be either close or distant. Close related expansion may be different sites on different breeds of cats. Distant related expansion could be a cat website owner starting a site on dogs and linking them.
There is a gray area in defining these but a successful expansion should include both types of related expansion.
Non Related Expansion
Beginning a new website on a new topic is a big step, and is usually done after you have done some related expansion on your first website. Non Related expansion is risky, and you may lose money. It is however a good thing to attempt. By completing a range of non-related websites you are protecting your income incase there is a loss of interest in your original niche.
This is particularly important (As previously noted) in areas such as celebrities where someone may draw in thousands of visitors one day and next to none a week later.
Non related expansion for example would be an animal website owner starting a technology blog.
Improvement
Improvement is a key step in maintaining your income from your websites. If you do not improve your website, keep it updated and relevant visitors, and profit from them, will begin to decrease. Google likes fresh and up to date, if you don’t provide this you can guarantee your search engine ranking positions will begin to drop like a stone.
By keeping your website relevant you should continue both growth and expansion, but improvement itself focuses more on maintaining and updating your site to ensure it contains relevant useful information. By keeping a site up to date you should see a steady free increase in traffic to your website.
Improving your website should cover several areas
New Content
Updated Content
Changes and testing (Play with your site, change layouts, change ad placements, see what works for you
By keeping your website up to date and informative you can ensure yourself a steady, free, traffic growth for your website. As part of your Improvement strategy you should keep focused on the same keywords, topic and niche. All other work on your website would either fall under growth or expansion, and should be done through those processes.
By following these three easy processes you should see a marked improvement in your websites traffic and income without spending a penny. This amazing free way to increase traffic to your website just requires a little discipline and hard work.
Tags: Building a Website · Maintaining a Website · SEO
Being an Englishman I sometimes find it hard to understand why many people of other countries say our language is confusing, until I saw this..
1. The bandage was wound around the wound.
2. The farm was used to produce produce.
3. The dump was so full it had to refuse more refuse.
4. We must polish the Polish furniture.
5. He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6. The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7. Since there was no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8. A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9. When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10. I did not object to the object.
11. The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12. There was a row among the oarsmen on how to row.
13. They were too close to the door to close it.
14. The buck does funny things when does are present.
15. A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16. To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17. The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18. After a number of injections my jaw got number.
19. Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
20. I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21. How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
Maybe the English language is a lil complicated after all!
Tags: Writing
January 4th, 2009 · 1 Comment
Sorry for the late update on this, Christmas was however very hectic. On December 31st the venerable Matt Cutts, Googles public facing blogger, announced that the PR update was nearly over. This has signalled the beginning and end of many websites out there, my latest Vegan Recipes Website, only two months old jumped from PR N/A to PR3, one of the largest PR jumps I have ever accomplished in such a short space of time!
The Google PR Update which normally occurs every 4-6 months is eagerly awaitied by the majority of white hat webmasters, though often dreaded by those who try to subvert Googles ranking systems. While Google PR has little effect on overall website rankings it has some major benefits, including increased directory ranking positions and increased profits form Link Sales!
So however the Google PR update went for you I hope it was a good one and wish all my readers a happy new year and increased profit in the coming 12 months!
Tags: Google · Maintaining a Website · News
Today I received my first payment from Adengage. Adengage differ from Google Adsense due to their limited number of ads shown, they do however have a fantastic buy and sell system.
The Adengage buy and sell system is incredibly simple, it lets you set a price, weekly or monthly and gives the option for you to hand out discounts to long term buyers.
So today I received my first payment from Adengage to my Paypal account, a full $50 which was pretty nice, just to point out they do give out payment to paypal at $20 but I tend to raise my payment thresholds to cut down on transaction fees.
I personally choose these guys over Bidvertiser, who unfortunately tend to show unfocused ads with very little opportunity to sell advertising space on site.
Soon however I will be replacing my Adengage adverts with the new Google Admanager/Adsense combos which are now available.
This way I will be able to have high quality targeted Adsense adverts combined with the ability to sell advertising space in my sites. While the Adengage buy/sell system is still better the majority of income comes off the generic ads, it does not have the generic ads available to Google. It is googles huge number of high quality targetted adsthat make it much more worthwhile to use as an income stream over Adengage.
Tags: Affiliate Payments · Maintaining a Website · Site News
Social bookmarking is a great way to increase traffic on your website. While many disregard social bookmarking traffic as ‘junk’ traffic it can infact be a solid way to increase unique visitors to your site and increase your PR with very little investment or effort.
Of course social bookmarking is not perfect, the traffic is undoubtedly low conversion. But the exposure to your brand this creates and occasional spikes sometimes gives around 30 times the days normal traffic, booming income from adverts and products!
But first lets take a more in depth look at the benefits. Firstly there is a tangible increase in page rank on heavily promoted websites using social bookmarking. Many social bookmarking websites do not use the no-follow tag on links. This means that all links to your site from social bookmarking sites will benefit your page rank.
Secondly your brand image is sent out to a wide generic spread of people, possibly bringing in untapped markets that you had not considered.
Thirdly if your content is quality, engaging and useful you will retain some visitors as repeat visitors and possibly customers!
Lastly you will get huge peaks on occasions, these are fantastic for bringing in a little boost to your websites income and will provide you with a few back links to your site. This gives you a nice traffic boost and increases your page rank even further!
The downsides are few, but rather important to point out.
The first major problem with social bookmarking is when a website suffers from what is known as the Digg Effect. The Digg Effect is when a website becomes a success on a social bookmarking website to the point where its server is overloaded and shuts down, or bandwidth for the site is exceeded.
The second is rather inconsequential but should be noted. Social bookmarking traffic is low conversion, so although you will see a nice increase in traffic you may not see much in the way of actual profit increase. This can distort your traffic stats and lower your Profit per Click, quite disheartening for some people!
You can gain an increase in traffic from social bookmarking quite easily, or cheaply. If you have the free time using a site such as Social Marker will help you automate logging in and submitting your websites and articles to a large number of social bookmarking sites. If you do not have the free time, or the will to do this (It is severely boring) there are thousands of services out htere who will do the task for you for a very low price!
Tags: Articles · Building a Website · Maintaining a Website · SEO
When I first started out as a freelance writer my writing was, and in someways still is, very muddled. I wouldn’t think about what I was writing quite so much, instead I just laid back and let my fingers talk bollocks for a thousand words or so.
It was only when I started getting feedback from poor work that I started to look back at my previous work. I did feel kinda ashamed I have to admit.
The truth is it is very easy to write badly, it is incredibly hard to write well. After my initial depression of realizing how shockingly bad my freelance writing had been I began to figure out how I could improve.
The best way I found initially was to re-write my work. I would write up a post and tehn go over it again with a fine tooth comb. By doing this I could ensure the article was well laid out, was easy to read and increased traffic to websites.
Nowadays I kind of re-write as I write, and afterwards I simply edit my work to ensure it’s readability and SEO Optimization, this way I can work quickly and create traffic generating text.
I can guarantee however that without the period of my life where I re-wrote everything I created first there is not a chance that I would still be a freelance writer today!
So for those who are having trouble with their writing, here are my top re-writing tips!
- Re-write the entire document, do not just pick and choose what you think needs doing!
- Before you re-write read through what you initially wrote and point out to yourself the poorly written areas and areas which could be laid out more coherently.
- After you have rewritten the doccument compare the work before and after, if you cannot see a marked improvement on what you ahve done then you are still doing something wrong!
- Double check your SEO, make sure your keywords are well laid out to optimize website traffic.
If you keep an eye on these you should see a remarkable improvement on customer satisfaction and traffic generation of your own websites!
Tags: Uncategorized
