It’s possible you’re sitting on a treasure chest right now. And the longer you’ve been trying to make money online, the higher your probability of striking gold is.

In fact, the more times you’ve screwed up, the more sites you have tried that have turned out to produce no income; the more times you’ve given up in the middle of a project and jumped to a new opportunity… the luckier you just might be!

Here’s the thing:

When you’re making websites, particularly as an affiliate and particularly when you’re looking for organic search engine traffic, AGE is an advantage.

Most of us know that the longer a domain has been registered, the more authority it’s given in the search engines, all other factors being equal. Not only that but the longer a domain has been registered, the more value it has for a potential sale, all else being equal.

It’s yet another reason why NOT GIVING UP is a great strategy online. The longer you hang in there, the greater the leverage you obtain!

Do you have any old sites lying around that you had continued to renew at the domain registrar but haven’t worked on in a while? If you know what to do with them, you could be about to hit the jackpot.

If you begin working on a site that’s been around for a while, registered for a while, indexed for a while, your results in the search engines can be twice as fast. That is twice as fast to get high rankings, bring in big traffic, and start seeing sales!

Not only that, but in the time you haven’t been working on the site, new keyword markets might have emerged, or new products to promote in that market may have come along, all of which YOU as the owner of an already indexed and aged domain might be in PRIME position to capitalize on.

And there’s more opportunity than that. If the niche you were in grew, and the competition increased, chances are your domain became more valuable too. People might be hunting down it’s owner as you’re reading this. You might have gotten one of the quality keyword rich .coms and now there are no more available… and so on.

So what do you do if this is you? How do you capitalize?

1. Look At Why You Abandoned The Site

Did you find it too difficult to rank? Clicks too expensive? Affiliate program didn’t convert?

Chances are that with your aged domain name it will be easier now to rank… plus there could be new keywords that are less competitive…

The clicks will probably only be more expensive, but again with the new keywords AND it might mean there’s better opportunity to make money from Adsense clicks when you get traffic from other places.

If the affiliate program didn’t convert, there might be new products to promote now. New offers might have become available. You might have found new networks to search in since then too.

2. Make Some Changes

Once you know which of the above problems you ran into originally, you simply change approach and get to work.

Maybe you need to change your monetization, write some new content to attack those new keywords, or rearrange your existing site layout. Whatever it is: Do what’s necessary! This is easy money here!

3. Promote!

Chances are you probably know at least a LITTLE more about generating traffic than you did back then. Put it to work! Remember all the work you do promoting this site will be double as effective now.

Put up new ad campaigns, write and submit new articles, look for new link partners, make new hub sites. Anything you can do will help. And with the knowledge that you’re already in a position of advantage, you should be more motivated than usual to keep going until you see the cash!

Bottom line: If you have old sites like this I hope this has been inspiring, but even if you don’t there’s an important message for you here.

The sites you’re working on right now? Even if they’re not working… if you tried and failed… it might not end up as much of a failure as you think. Keep renewing those domains, keep them hosted if it’s not too expensive, and see how the scene looks in a year’s time.

If you can stick at this thing, if you can keep going and not give up, fortune… AND Google… WILL favor you.

There’s a piece of conventional search engine optimization wisdom that I think needs challenging.

Hands up if you’ve heard this:

“Smart SEO strategy is to start out targeting your long tail keywords first, and as you generate fast traffic from them and grow your site’s authority it becomes easier to take on your more short tail, competitive terms.”

Overall, it has it’s truths, and isn’t bad advice. But lately I’m finding the opposite strategy to also have merit.

That is, trying to target some of your shorter tail keywords first, and it becoming easier to rank for your long tail keywords as you build links to your short tail focused content.

Example:

I’m promoting Firepow software and my short tail keyword is Firepow, and my long tail keywords (a few of them) might be Firepow blogging software, and Firepow blogging software review.

I have been noticing both in analyzing competing sites in some of my niches, and confirmed by testing it on my own sites, that when you start out building links to your site (possibly your home page) with the anchor text “Firepow”, it becomes easier to rank for “Firepow Blogging Software” almost by default.

I’ve seen cases where I’ve got a blog on a domain like: reviewfirepow.com and I want that root domain to rank for Firepow so I go about building my links… and after time my post (eg) reviewfirepow.com/firepow-blogging-software is ranking for Firepow Blogging Software even though I didn’t build a SINGLE link to that post…

Where alternatively I would have spent time building lots of links to that individual post to have it ranking, then moved on to another keyword, by hitting the main keyword hardest and first, ranking for the subsequent keywords requires less, or even NO effort.

I’ve seen competitor sites doing it too. Building NO links to their inner pages but all links to their home page and just ON PAGE optimizing all their post pages well, and by consequence sending so much spider juice to those  inner pages that that, in itself, along with sitting on an authoritative domain with alot of links is enough to have those inner pages rank for all their long tail keywords.

If you do this, you do sacrifice a little long tail traffic in the short term, but over the long term, pick up more of it, as well as more short tail traffic because you spent more of your optimization and link building efforts there.

While this is not a call to drop the one method and replace it with the other, it’s definitely something to think about, and maybe test out in your own SEO. If you happen to do so, or have done so already, do let me know!

I hope you found this valuable.

This last couple of weeks I’ve been doing up a little sample campaign to show what our new Plug and Play Niche Cash can do and I came across a fascinating and potentially very powerful little SEO finding that I thought I’d share.

So the campaign went something like this…

I created a blog with 2 main posts.

Each post was targeted to a keyword of it’s own.

I was trying to get those 2 blog posts ranking for those keywords.

My link building went something like this…

I built many links to each of the posts with the anchor text of their main keyword including links from other blogs, links from article submissions, and so on. Of all the links obtained, probably 80% were coming back to those blog posts with those same keywords as anchor text. There was some serious link juice flowing too, as a number of those links were from PR5’s, PR3’s and more.

There was also a few links from article submissions where I linked to the root domain, with the anchor text just http://thedomain.com. So no keyword in the anchor text and only 3 links in total going to the URL of the actual root domain.

Now get this…

The first result that I get in the search engines is that my ROOT DOMAIN… not the post pages… shows up as ranking (still deep down, like 5 pages back) for BOTH of the keywords I was originally targeting INSTEAD of the post pages I was actually using to target those keywords!

In other words, for example:

URL 1, which looked like http://thedomain.com/keyword-title-whatever

had probably 10 links from many quality sites, PR5’s, PR3’s, ALL using that keyword as the anchor text.

URL 2, which was the root domain http://thedomain.com

had 3 links, from one article directory, 0 PR on the actual pages the links were from and NONE of them with anchor text being that keyword…

And URL 2 showed up in the SERPS for that keyword FIRST, and URL 1 is still no where to be found!!

Are you getting the significance of that?

The domain on it’s own was able to get into the SERPS with relatively NO links, and NO proper on page optimization… Why does Google love root domains so much?

I know that eventually with continued building, my post pages will take over for their targeted keywords, but for those of you looking for the FASTEST rankings (which I know you all are), this means something very important.

Usually I avoid building too hard to my blog’s home page because I don’t want it getting much traffic – a blog’s home page is terrible for conversions, too much going on, too many links, too many options etc.

But these results suggest that you might like to try (at least at the beginning) sticking up a static home page and building links to your blog’s home page using the anchor text of a main keyword you’d like to rank for. You can/should still do what I’d normally recommend which is to create an individual blog post on every keyword you want to rank for (even the keyword you’re also now targeting on the home page so you can eventually obtain double listings on page 1) and build links to those posts (they will convert the highest), the only difference being you’ll throw your home page into the mix with it’s own unique keyword too.

Give it a shot and see how the speed of your rankings/traffic/sales on a new site improves.

It’s been the case for so long that to even bring it up in a post seems trivial.

Yet, despite everything it seems that new and intermediate marketers never quite stop falling for this SEO trap.

“Hundreds Of High PR Links For $29″

“Get Thousands Of ONE WAY Links To YOUR Website”

Sound familiar? That thinking is the trap.

People get so worked up doing everything they can to get as MANY links as possible to their sites as possible, confident that if they can only get enough links, they’ll be guaranteed rankings.

Despite how widespread that notion is, it’s simply not true. Great SEOs have told us for a long time that it’s the QUALITY of links that counts, not the quantity.

“A small number of the most high quality most targeted, authoritative and relevant links will do more for your rankings than 1000 crappy, irrelevant links.“

I can think of at least 3 ways this thinking is not only unhelpful, but alot of times downright dangerous for your sites and your rankings.

1. It’s a waste of time. Why build 1000 links when you can get the same results building an awesome 10? Even if you’re using an automatic submitter for the 1000 and emailing the 10 people manually it’ll probably STILL take you less time. Why do things the hard way? Haven’t we got enough work to do?

2. It’s a recipe for come and go search rankings. If Google can see your links growing disproportionately to your traffic, you’ll look unnatural and may be penalized. So why risk penalty for a technique that’s wasting your time anyway?

3. “Link Only” Links. All these links, whether they’re from social bookmarking sites, directories, “hubs”, network profile sites, or plain old link directories on some random blog… they’re all “link only” links. They provide a link and it might boost your search rankings after time, but you’re not going to see a visitor from it. For pretty near the same effort you can get links in ways that can bring traffic AND a link… and a better link at that…

A content trade, a guest post, a sponsored link, there’s a big list of ways to get “traffic AND link” links that might be worth putting into your marketing arsenal. I’m not saying those other kinds of links are worthless, all have their place, they all help, but their NUMBER is not to be obsessed over.

Finally, to seal the deal, we have to talk about that all important factor of relationships.

If you’re only focusing on that mass form of link building… where are your relationships? In the same amount of time you spent submitting to 1000 social bookmarking sites, you could have started relationships with 3 or 4 highly authoritative websites in your market that could provide links and traffic to your sites FOR LIFE. Not to mention partnerships, joint ventures, revenue swaps, and so many more opportunities for revenue it’ll make your head spin!

Bottom line, don’t get caught up on the numbers with your link building. Build quality links, build the RIGHT links and you’ll save time and money on your journey towards bigger online profits.

If you use the All in One SEO plugin for your Wordpress blogs, the results of a little test I did this past week might be of interest to you.

Let me explain the theory, then my little test, then the results…SEO guru Jerry West pointed out in a post that I was reading that when Google is looking for duplicate content ON YOUR SITE (not external duplicate content which we should have cleared up by now) it’s hard for them to exactly compare, sentence by sentence the total text on two separate pages, so a big factor in influencing their search for duplicate content is similar page titles on your site… that is.. the title that appears at the top of your browser bar or, what goes in the Title Tag of each individual page.

Now…

If you’re a blogger with Wordpress, you SHOULD be using a plugin like All in One Wordpress SEO to pretty up your page and post titles, meta descriptions and keyword tags, not to mention beat duplicate content on your category and archive pages.

The thing is, the default setting when you install All in One SEO is for the the title of all your blog posts and blog pages to show up as below…

Notice that “BLOG TITLE” is inserted into the title tag of every page and post. If you have a long blog title, like I do for this blog, it can mean that the majority of the words in your title tag can be THE SAME on every title tag of every page (post) on your site, resulting in what Google might more easily because of this, judge as a page of duplicate content.

For example if I happened to write 2 posts called

Opportunity Hopping Sucks

and

Free Traffic Rules

The titles on these two blog posts would be:

Opportunity Hopping Sucks – Andrew Hansen Dot Name – Niche Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Free Traffic

Free Traffic Rules – Andrew Hansen Dot Name – Niche Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Free Traffic

See how similar those look?? Even to a human eye not a computer algorithm, that could be mistaken for duplicate content.

So what about my test?

What I did was simple.

I’d had a couple of sites that’d been floating round the front page in the SERPS for a particular term. I tried changing the post and page titles to remove the BLOG TITLE from every post and page. It looked as below:

What was clear was that on both pages (different sites) I made the test on,  their rankings grew by at least 3 places on page one, basically as soon as Google recrawled and reindexed the page. This is a small and definitely not comprehensive enough test, but it makes alot of sense why it happened and would be proven to happen systematically as a result of G’s algorithm.

FURTHER THAN improving the rankings by eliminating what could be viewed as duplicate content, this tweak has another clear benefit.

When your blog title appears on the title of every page and post, that title appears in the search rankings as the title of your listing! It makes for a very unclickable title, almost always resulting in elipses (…) at the end of the listing title, which is proven to decrease CTR on your listing.

Making this tweak ensures your blog posts titles and hence listing titles are clean and more often elipses free… something short and to the point that a real person can click on!

The accumulated effect of Google viewing your site more favorably as my test indicates AND increasing the click through rate of EVERY POST and page that you have indexed in the search engines makes this a SIGNIFICANT change and one that you should DEFINITELY make if you use Wordpress and All in One SEO.

We’ve changed it to be the default setting for all blogs created with Firepow and I recommend you do the same.

To your success!

I was reading a great post by Jerry West today about helping improve your spider activity and page rank by finding places where your site is linking out to URLs that are now showing errors.

He shared a great free resource for quickly analyzing your whole site to find out where your broken links are…

You can download the program here, it’s called Xenu and runs from your desktop.

A little analysis on my own blog revealed a common and unfortunate trend, and I’m willing to bet that if you have a blog that’s been up any period of time, you have this problem too and you might not even realize.

So like a good person, I leave Do Follow’s on my blog comments. I like to reward people for commenting, make this feel like a family, you know how it is…

But as it turns out, those commenters who I reward… some of them are hurting my site and they didn’t even realize.

The majority of the broken links on my blog were from people who had left comments and made mistakes in the URL they associated to their name!

I just look at the comment text when I moderate it, I rarely check to see if the site the person linked to is a real live link.

But as it turns out, people made mistakes… typos in their URL… their site is no longer live, and so on.

And unfortunately it’s a pain to fix too.

When Xenu tells you what the link URL is that’s broken, you go in your WP admin to COMMENTS and EDIT… then search for the URL here:

And change it to something. Maybe link to http://google.com or something, just so you know the link is at least live… OR remove it all together and take an extra outgoing link off your page.

This of course is just one of the kinds of outgoing link that can be broken, but after you’re finished with the comment problem areas you can move on to the other links and fix them up too.

The result will be a well oiled spider machine that’s ready for deep crawling, quality indexing and a boost in search traffic!

Just press play on the video below to see why and how you can take your fears about duplicate content, flip em on their heads, and start GAINING from them instead of losing…

Remember: The Firepow $1 trial is on and you can create blogs just like in this video and start taking advantage of syndicated content (not to mention automated blog creation and link building) TODAY by clicking here…

I’ve been getting asked this question more and more lately so I thought it’d be worth a quick blog post…

Here’s the thing:

If you’ve seen your site’s pages listed in the search engines one day, then gone the next day…

DON’T WORRY!

Particularly when your site is new, it’s the nature of the search engines that you’ll drop in and out of the SERPS (the search listings) frequently.

You’ll be there one day, gone the next, then back in again the day after that. It’s just something that happens when Google is first spidering your site, trying to work out what you’re up to and where you deserve to be in the listings.

The jumping around is RARELY due to something you did BUT there is of course the rare occasion when it’s because you’ve done something that raised a red flag (like suddenly had thousands of incoming links in the first week of a brand new site) and you’re being punished. But I must say that of all the people who’ve asked me that, I’ve never seen someone for which this was the case.

Ok, so have we got that clear? It happens, don’t panic, just keep building your content, keep trying to get links and it will allllll be ok

So news broke yesterday of a new “Google Slap” at Adwords that particularly targeted affiliate review sites and the affiliate marketing world is awash with panic. If you use PPC or organic traffic, this is something you need to be aware of.

There’s been a lot of talk about what this does and doesn’t mean for affiliate marketing, and it seems like the need for some backpeddling and clarification is high.

Before we do anything else, let’s review the facts.

Firstly, we need to take all information about this slap with a grain of salt. There’s not a lot of info about it yet besides a few blog posts mostly referencing this blog post. We need to wait for further analysis from some of the big ppc giants after the dust settles.

The facts are that a number of affiliate marketers using Adwords have noticed that their quality score on pages that contained affiliate links, suddenly went from 10 (a good score) to 1 (bad score), which is typical of “slaps” in general. Suddenly you need to pay a stupid amount of money per click so you can’t keep bidding on that term and you’re out of the game.

What was interesting about this slap, was:

“these were NOT skinny sites, rather well build out, consistently updated blogs with good navigation above the fold, xml site maps, high click through, hyper-relevant keyword mapping, low bounce rates, long average time on page  … everything else Google loves.

When we analyzed which pages survived, and we take it in combination with other information, it seems pretty clear they’ve added code which screens for affiliate links on the landing pages.”

So it seems at this stage that the sheer presence of an affiliate link has caused a slapping.

Does Google hate affiliate marketing? Do affiliate marketers need to change their business model? Will these changes eventually apply to organic search listings too??

These are some important questions, so let’s look at each in turn.

1. Does Google Hate Affiliate Marketing?

I found it strange as did another couple of commenters (the minority) that the tone of the initial, and currently still most authoritative post on this slap took the angle of “it’s time for affiliate marketers to change their business model”.

Google does NOT hate affiliate marketing.

I remind you of the pertinent fact that yes, Google does own a huge affiliate network of it’s own called DoubleClick. Besides that, they make a truck load of money from affiliate marketers running ads with them. Further still, affiliate marketing isn’t just a Google thing, it’s an internet thing. Affiliate marketing is a growing industry and a huge source of income for some of the net’s biggest players (think ebay and Amazon). There’s no reason for Google to start flat out beating up affiliate marketers per se.

So why the scan for affiliate links? What does Google REALLY hate?

Personally, I’m waiting to hear more about the “context” of the affiliate link slappings, because that’s important. I just flat out don’t yet believe that they slapped EVERY single page that was running a PPC ad and contained an affiliate link.

Maybe they slapped landing pages that had affiliate links that bid on keywords that already had a number of affiliates promoting the same term… Or landing pages containing affiliate links that promoted a certain type of product.

One commenter alluded to something that I haven’t been able to find further information on about the slap but that might be a hint:

“You forgot, (or just plain left out), the fact that google slapped sites, (all sites not just review sites), that used the “Google” trademark in their product name.

It wasn’t all review sites. A bunch of review sites were promoting these products that Google didn’t give permission to. So they naturally slapped them silly.”

Again, we will have to wait to hear more about the context of the slapped sites but regarding what Google hates, we can make some observations. In fact, Perry gave some hints in his post:

“[Google] don’t like anyone who’s doing “me too.”

And that makes sense. If you’re one of 5 ads promoting the same product without any unique content or angle, it’s likely Google is looking for a way to eliminate you. Note: They don’t want to eliminate you because you’re an affiliate, but because you’re a “me too” affiliate. They’re trying to serve the highest quality, most relevant ads and content to their viewers and if you’re one of 5 that’s pretty much the same, you’re not high quality… not a tough logical leap to make.

Likewise if you’re a direct linker (if that business model isn’t dead already), you’re not providing value by yourself, so you’re not doing G any favors. Moving on…

2. Do affiliate marketers need to change their business model?

Now there’s all this talk that affiliate marketers need to stop pushing affiliate links and instead change to building lists and relationships.

Of course, building lists and relationships is smart, but I don’t see anything about this new slap that means it should REPLACE putting targeted relevant links on your content pages where it’s appropriate.

I’ve said before that there are certain niches and keyword markets where building a list is of little value and it’s easier and more profitable to push a reader straight to the product they’re looking for and let them be. Did anything about that change because Google freaked out about affiliate links on certain landing pages? Of course not.

The smart words spoken are:

“Fortunately it’s possible to be a “Value Added Affiliate” who adds a unique contribution to the product of whatever person you are promoting.”

It sure is! Adding value as an affiliate is crucial, and good affiliates know that. But that doesn’t JUST mean sending people to an opt in form instead of an aff link. There are many ways to add value.

Finally…

3. Will these changes eventually apply to organic search listings too?

First we have to note the difference between the two, starting with:

a) You can’t get an organic listing by paying for it. You can’t get it immediately either. In ranking you on the front page for a keyword, the algorithms have to do a number of checks and analyses to decide that your site is high quality before they send you traffic. Not the same with PPC.

b) the nature of making sites for organic traffic is that you’re providing content first, and if you’re not providing unique content and getting links from authoritative sites in the same circles, you’re not getting Google’s traffic.

In light of that, can you envision a situation where a blog say, with unique content, plenty of incoming links and authority, great on page optimization, and a reasonable and not overly excessive promotion of a relevant product (that’s not in a scam prone niche or using Google’s trademark in their product name) via an affiliate link being kicked out of the SERPS?

We should never say never, but personally, I don’t see it.

So end of the day, we need to be aware of what Google’s doing at Adwords whether we’re PPC marketers or not. But at the same time, we don’t need to freak out and draw our own conclusions from it that don’t match the facts.

Hope this soothes some nerves

Not into BEO? Don’t know what it is?

Maybe you should…

There’s so many new search engines that have come along the past couple of years that I’ve intentionally begun paying them no interest. More recently we saw Wolfram Alpha (which after all the hype, pretty much flat out sucked) and then Microsoft’s BING.com.

Bing.com was in the “who gives a rat’s ***” category for me along with all the others… until yesterday evening.

I was checking on the traffic stats of one of my little niche sites for the first few days of July and this is what I saw…

Interestingly, Bing.com generated a little more than 1 third the traffic that Google did over this few days.

You might think that’s not significant but consider that it’s twice as much as the traffic from Yahoo and quadruple the traffic from MSN AND it’s an engine that’s only a few months old, and you’ve got a definite cause for investigation.

I wish I had some insight to share about how I increased traffic by 30% through Bing but… I don’t.

I don’t know how I got rankings in there (although when I checked, I noticed my rankings in Bing for many terms were higher than my rankings in G for the same terms, which may indicate at least some difference in the search algorithms) but I’ll certainly continue the little investigation.

I’ll also be watching to see if my traffic from bing.com INCREASES from that amount as they index more of my content. It’ll also be interesting to see how quickly they can index content compared to G. I’ll see if I can do some tests on that for you too.

In any case, it’s all interesting stuff and I’m sure it won’t be long before we’re seeing courses on BEO (Bing Engine Optimization… wait, that’s not quite right… BO? American President… Ok so I don’t know what it will be called.) abounding.. hopefully a couple that that will even be worth reading