Blogging is a great method of adding fresh content to your website on a regular basis and gaining the advantage necessary to get ahead of the competition in search engine results. A good blog suggests to the search engines that the website is well maintained, up to date and is being constantly managed. As important as it is for your website to include an effective blog it is also vitally important that the articles published are of a high quality and follow recommended guidelines:
- Choose an Interesting Title – the title is the first glimpse of your article the visitor sees and is therefore vitally important. Which is more appealing – Revenue Tips for Individual Filers or Ten Tips Revenue Dosen’t Want You to Know?
- Ask Questions and Provide Answers – visitors are attracted to articles that help them with a specific query or problem.
- Provide Ordered How-To Steps – articles that bring readers from the question to the answer in ordered steps are rewarding to visitors.
- Supply Simple How-to Details – too many articles tell readers what to do without telling them how to do it. Do not presume visitors have the same knowledge as you.
- Use Examples and Quotes – examples are a great way to convince a visitor of your point. Make regular reference to past examples and personal experiences that validate your points. Also provide quotes where applicable from well known experts in the particular field.
- Include Relevant Links – direct visitors to other appropriate articles to backup and reinforce your points.
- Avoid Jargon and Cliches - cliches and jargon are boring and will turn visitor away. Communicate your point clearly and visitors will be suitably impressed with the tired cliches.
- Keep Sentences and Paragraphs Short - readers bore and lose concentration easily. Make your article easy to read by keeping sentences and paragraphs short.
- Make it Personal – speak directly to your readers through your articles. Have a personal conversation with them. You are not lecturing to your visitors but sharing information on a topic of common interest.
- Self-Promote Sensibly – avoid cheap plugs and cheap promotion within articles. If your article is beneficial to visitors they will revisit your site and promote it to others without you telling them to do so.
By following these article writing tips you will ensure that your articles are of most benefit to your visitors and therefore more likely to return to your site in the future and also promote your website to others.
Getting visitors to your website is the most difficult aspect of website design to achieve. Once you have completed this step follow our guidelines to ensure this hard earned visit is not in vain and the user will not leave your site quickly:
- Fix Broken Links and Errors – use an online service to ensure all linked pages are active and error free. Your website should always be free from spelling mistakes, broken links, navigation problems and any other problems that irritate and annoy users. http://www.linkalarm.com/ offers a reporting services where you can schedule an automatic check for broken links while http://validator.w3.org/ offers html and css code validity checks.
- Review your Website in all Browsers – different web browsers such as Internet Explorer and FireFox treat web pages differently so what looks good in one browser may not look good in another. Ensure your website looks as you expect it in all the major browsers – http://www.NetMechanic.com/ offers a great tool for previewing your website in all the major Internet browsers in one go.
- Include a Contact Web-form – include a web-form on your website where users can contact you easily on-site.
- Include your Company Message – always include you company message or slogan beside the company logo. This will ensure visitors are actively aware of the products or services you are offering and not just the company name.
- Include a Guarantee and a Privacy Statement – a guarantee and privacy statement will help users feel more secure as it takes away an element of risk and helps establish the credibility of the website. This is particularly important for e-commerce websites.
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Do you have a content rich, themed website that attracts a decent amount of traffic on a monthly basis? If so, congratulations because you have already overcome the greatest obstacle in generating a steady flow of income – getting traffic to your website. The next step should be achieved more easily and involves incorporating Google AdSense into your website.
Google AdSense was launched in 2003 as an advertising program to liaise between potential online advertisers and vast number of website owners. AdSense offers online advertisers the opportunity to create text or image ads that are displayed on their search engine results pages and on websites enlisted into the AdSense program. Advertisers pay Google an agreed amount of money each time their ad is clicked. Google pays a percentage of this to the website owner where ads have appeared and keeps the remaining portion of the income. Commissions are only paid when an ad is clicked so the number of times the ad is viewed is irrelevant.
Google Advertiser Options
Google AdSense offers a variety of advertising options to cater for a wide variety of websites:
- Google AdSense for Content - a variety of text and / or image ads of a variety of sizes and shaped.
- Google AdSense for Search – implements a Google search bar on your website that produces a results page containing pay-per-click ads.
- Google AdSense for Feeds – ads that appear in your feeds.
- Google AdSense for Domains – ads for a parked domain.
- Google AdSense AdSense for Mobile Content – ads for mobile websites.
Google issues payments once an account has exceeded $100 in value. However, to successfully receive payment you must ensure to comply with all Google Webmaster and Google AdSense Terms and Conditions. Be advised that you will not get the better of Google by clicking your own ads or promoting others to do so – while you may get away with this for some time, a more thorough check will be implemented once you have exceeded the $100 withdrawal limit and you will be found out. Read Google Advertiser Guidelines for a complete understanding of the terms and conditions.
Formatting your Google AdSense Ads
Your choice of format and colour for your AdSense advertisement will have a significant impact on the potential earnings. Choose a ad size that will pace the ads prominently on your website without dominating the other content. Similarly blending your ads into the theme and layout of your website is an extremely worthwhile exercise. This is achieved by setting the ad title, text and URL attributes to the same values as other content on your website so as to ensure the site is visually appealing and the content is not dominated by the Google ads.
However you should not try to blend your ads with the intention of misleading the user or try to hide the fact that the ads are in fact ads and a part of the Google AdSense network.
Getting Started
In general it takes as little as 15 minutes before an or search box is implemented from scratch through Google AdSense. To get started all you need is:
- A Google AdSense account.
- A website with a constant volume of traffic.
Google AdSense is an extremely user friendly and flexible tool so I would recommend experimenting with different ads. Once you stay with the Google guidelines you will come up with a strategy that best suits your websites needs.
5 Other Website Options
- Affiliate Marketing – sell someone else’s product for a sales based commission.
- eBay Partners Network – provide links on your website to eBay products that you receive a commission on when bought.
- Direct Advertising – Define areas on your website where you display ads from non Google sources.
- Donations - If your website is purely informational your users may be prepared to donate for helpful information.
- Amazon Partner - provide links on your website to Amazon products that you receive a commission on when bought.
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All major search engines including Google use spider programs to crawl through indexed websites, at regular intervals, gathering information about them in order to provide fast, accurate and up to date search engine results. To ensure your site is effectively crawled (and therefore ensuring your website is known to the search engines) you should understand how search engine spiders work spiders, what they expect to find and what will cause problems.
The most important factor when considering search engine spiders is to ensure that the search spiders have plenty of basic links to follow when they crawl your site. Search engine spiders will begin by indexing the text on your homepage and will then attempt to follow all available links to other pages on your website. It is important to realise that various website elements such as frames, dynamic URLs, Flash movies, image based homepages and all hinder the work of spiders and can result in your website not being indexed and therefore not showing up in search engine results pages. If you decide to include these feature nonetheless it is vital that you generate an XML sitemap that will tell a spider where dynamic content can be found and guide the spider through your website. Even if your site does not include such features placing a text link to your sitemap in your homepage footer is strongly recommended. Not only will the sitemap guide the spider through indexing your site it will also provide users with a valuable way of naviagting through your site quickly.
Finally, it’s important to have a robots.txt file present in your root directory as some search spiders will not even crawl your website without finding one first. To ensure your robots.txt is acceptable to Google check the status of the file regularly in Google Webmaster Tools.
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