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Lies, damn lies and Google

I think now is appropriate time to wade in on the are paid links spam debate the big boys have been fighting it out to the point that blows were very nearly struck, to be honest both side have well thought out and constructive arguments. I won’t go to heavily into the debate but will include some great web links where you can get a good idea of what is going on. Instead I was to draw you to 2 issues I feel need to be raised that seemed to have been forgotten.

Google is a company

Google is not a state, country or a charity Google is a money making company being listed in Google is not your right and you have no legal control over making them list your site. Therefore we can debate till we are blue in the face but the Google Search engine is controlled by a company that ultimately has to make money to survive, one of its main revenue streams sits on the right hand side of your screen every time you do a Google search. Google bosses must have by now realised the problem, if people can pay SEO companies to buy good links and optimise sites to get to the number 1 spot in the search engines then it will provide a far better return on investment then short term Adword campaigns it is therefore in their interest to see this becoming harder and more expensive to do.
Google has a problem it cannot alienate customers or competitors to much and therefore has made or rather left concessions in its policies.

What is editorial control

Why is it ok to buy links from Yahoo directory but not my site? Because according to Google, Yahoo directory shows editorial control, they filter out inappropriate sites that don’t fit a criteria and therefore are not motivated by money. Lets look at that again…
Yahoo directory is:

• A human edited directory
• Who takes only paid submissions
• Pays its editors

Now I’m sure the Yahoo editors do a great job but what makes them have any less or more editorial control then myself. Lets take this blog for example, their is no way I’m going to allow a Viagra company advertise here or any company except those relevant to the site. I have full editorial control and are perfectly capable of saying no I also know what I think is the sort of sites our readers would be interested in. In our community friends slot at the minute is Wordtracker they are a great company and yes the link is an affiliate one but that doesn’t make them any less of a great company. If Google wants to delist a site they have every right to do so but to delist it because of paid links is like they are saying the site owner was incapable of making editorial control, now I’m not a lawyer but thats got to be close to slander?

I am not a terrorist

In the UK we have anti movie copying ads on all DVD’s they go something like this….

DVD Piracy is wrong, its a crime, by making, selling or buying a pirated DVD you are helping terrorism

That was a bit of a leap, I copy a DVD for a friend I’m helping terrorism? Google uses the same techniques as that ad it has managed to blur the lines between what it doesn’t want you to do and the Law. Interestingly I hear a lot of people referring to Blackhat techniques as illegal and while many probably are being a black hat SEO doesn’t mean you break the law merely that you break Google webmaster guidelines.

Is it safe to buy links

2 things have become obvious through out this, one Google can’t detect paid links easily and with many Webmasters wising up to simple things like using the word sponsors it will become harder, hence they are trying to get people to rat out such links, two Google is a huge PR machine and ultimately it plans to eliminate paid links not algorithmically but through propaganda. Ultimately my advice remains the same, never buy for PR always buy for targeted traffic in your subject area with good anchor text alternatively look for button ads like the one to the right of this post, great links carry weight almost impossible to detect as paid for these might not be as useful as anchored text links but they have the potential to get your brand to 1000s of visitors.

Light reading

• SEOMoz – Matt Cutt on paid links
• WPW Video with Rand and Graywolf over paid links
• Graywolf presentation at SES
• SEOMoz coverage of Paid links session at SES
• Two quick ones from Andy Beard Slippery slope for Google | Paid Links vital for relevancy
• Last but not least Mr Cutts own words on how to report a paid link

One last thing

We still looking for community friends if your site, company or product would be of interest to our readers let us know we would love to welcome new friends to the site, though Pharmaceutical companies need not apply

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Selling advertisements in your site (links,banners,etc) is a cool way to make more money from your site. The best benefit in this business model is that you don’t have to wait for any third party to send you a cheque, so you can faster “recycle” the money you earn.

Selling text links

Selling text links is the easiest thing to do, as the requirements are not so difficult to get reached and there are plenty of places to find new customers. Bellow are my thoughts on this subject.

Put your links in a visible place

Most webmasters buy links for SEO purposes, but as Google wants to “eliminate” sponsored links from their algorithm, more and more people are actually looking for traffic. So make sure that the sponsored links in your site are visible, and that they exist on a high traffic web page.

Don’t use common phrases in your sponsors listings

Google can recognize sponsored links by the tag line you have before them. Instead of using the phrase “Sponsored links” or “Sponsors” you can use a graphic or a phrase like “Sites we like”. This will give more value to the links you sell.

Put some links there before start selling

People don’t like to be the first to use a service. If the advertiser see some links there he/she will probably like to follow more. But you should be careful on that as none wants to buy a link on a page that has 20 or more listings

Selling your banner inventory

A common thing I see in banner sales is that people sell their inventory on monthly basis. I am not really sure if this, or if selling on CPM basis is better, but I guess it depends on the site. In general there are a few principles for both ways.

Selling banners on monthly basis

In my opinion the best way to do this is by having a few small banners in the sidebar of your site, and a very small number of banners in the header of your site. A big mistake is to use 10 or even more banners in rotation in the header of your site. This way the value of your ad space is getting lower and the traffic/visibility is getting smaller and smaller as new advertisers come in. Make sure that you rotate no more than 5 banners, and rotate them on a random way so that each banner will get the same impressions with the others.

Selling your inventory on CPM basis

Selling banners on CPM basis (cost per thousand impressions) has the main benefit that you can reach bigger advertisers and that you sell ads by performance. So if your site have a big raise in traffic (eg. you got on digg’s frontpage) you will earn more money, while with monthly basis ads you should wait some time to raise your prices

If you use this model make sure that you are using a well known script to do the job because this will make you look more serious to your clients. A great choice is openAds (aka phpAdsNew) which is open source and you can download it for free.

Also be sure that you are not displaying too many times the same ad per session because this will cause lower CTR and your clients wont be satisfied. In general advertisers want to fill their campaign the soonest possible but they care more for clicks.

How to find clients to sell your ads

So you set up your ad platform, created some nice places in your site to display ads and you need some clients. Let me show you how this is get done

Is your site a good choice for an advertiser?

Ok you know that your site is the best advertising opportunity in your niche, but you should tell that to the possible client too

You should explain in your sales page why your site is good for advertisers. For instance you can define your visitors, or give some information on the niche that your site is.

Additionally you can add some graphs (traffic, alexa, pagerank buttons, etc.) Those will help them to buy.

Have an “advertise here” link in your site

I know this is so obvious, but believe me there were countless times I wanted to buy advertisements in sites and couldn’t reach such a page. You need to cross link your sales page from all your site, and make sure that this link is visible. I am emphasizing on this obvious thing because most of my in house advertisements are soled to regular visitors of the sites I own.

Post your ad in forums

As you know there are countless webmaster forums out there, and most of them have a marketplace where webmasters can buy/sell or even trade several webmaster related services and products. You can use them to post your ad, but be careful not to write BS in your thread

Get your site listed in AdBrite’s marketplace

Ok, that’s a little black hat, but as Mark Cook explains here, it is easy to get listed in AdBrite’s marketplace without using their system

Give incentives to your clients

You can always give some added value to your clients. For instance you can give some freebie to your advertisers like an ebook or a review in your blog. A great incentive that worked for me is giving a lifetime link to the donators of webdigity.

Final concusions

In general selling your inventory yourself requires some time in order to find out how to make the most out of it. But it really worths your time as you don’t have to wait for third party network cheques, and you don’t need to pay a big cut of your earnings to them just because they connect you with the “client”.

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Are you a directory owner and are you ready for the day that Google stops telling users PR from the toolbar. Most directories make their money based on the PR value while we in the SEO world scoff at the childish mentality for directory owners it’s a 1 way ticket to profit, higher PR means you can charge more for your links. Other then people submitting links most directories receive little to none genuine traffic this makes having a high PR even more vital as its one of the few matrices that is known to many webmasters out there.

So when you see comments like this from Googlers

Given that many of you aren’t so fond of PR info in the toolbar, I’d love to know what feature you would like to see. Mandatory criteria:
- Would have to provide actionable info for webmasters
- Would need to be useful and interesting for the ~99.9% of users who aren’t webmasters

Source – SEO Round table

Its time to be thinking about how you and your directories will cope in the no PR era.

The options

The way I see it their are 3 options when it comes to looking at the future, do nothing, sell or evolve. The first I don’t really see as an option the other 2 are worth considering.

Selling your site

Now would be the perfect time to sell your site, except of course the next PR update is due soon could this be the last? If you sell now you might not get the same price you would have got if the sites PR has risen, but leave it till after the PR update and you will be competing with an array of sites that have just had a good push and the owners want to offload.
Site selling fluctuates just like any other market knowing when to sell can make the difference between a fair price and a good price.

A quick look at sitepoint and Digital Point forums today showed that a PR 4 Directory would go for around $800 a PR 5 in excess of $2000 while a PR 3 would barely make it past the $150 mark.

Therefore we can see that the difference between a PR 4 and PR 5 is quite significant (but so is the work)

A good rule of thumb is to look at the sites monthly revenue and multiply by 12-16 to get an estimate but not all sites reach their estimates.

Evolving

Still with us, then perhaps selling was not the answer then its time to evolve ultimately to stay in the market you will need to add services and value to your site.

Without PR you will need a new benchmark people will be looking to your directory less as a means to direct money earning but to traffic so what can you do?

• Set up a blog, and advertise featured sites on blog post
• Create link or link adsvertising services
• Go social and embrace web2.0
• Something else?

Setting up a blog
The idea is simple create and maintain a blog attached to your directory, instead of the usual google adsense pull featured listings from your directory. Now this only works if you maintain the blog, but a successful blog will encourage users to submit link (it also works for building up those inbound links)

Become a link broker
You have a vast quantity of links and people looking to be advertised why not get into the link brokerage game, offering to match links within the directory assisting in 3 way link building. This can be done on many levels but the simplest is to allow users to opt in to the link broker scheme and then provide them with a list and a controlled way to contact each other. Of course these schemes can get very complicated but just look at Text Link ads.

Going social the web 2.0
Have a look at mybloglog, blog catalog, digg, reddit what do you notice, they are all directories! At their heart the same ideas of directories are their sure the focus has changed but they are still offering links back to the users site. The difference is they do so under the flag of being a community they provide a sense of belonging even if you don’t want to go as far as installing pling or similar think of the ways you can bring the community feel to your site.

Something completely different
Hey its not all about my ideas their are loads of ways to turn your directory into something more, how about a CSS gallery site? what about site profiles and allowing user feedback?
Tell us what your going to do when the end of the world comes (at least for directories)

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Running e-commerce sites can be a great source of revenue but have you ever been in the situation where only a couple of products are being sold at the expense of others after all you can only feature so many products on your home page.

Mini Sites

Mini or niche sites are a favoured tactic of the SEO community for years, they allow you to target specific terms without having to adjust an entire site instead you create smaller sites dedicated to one product or niche that then link back to the main page to make the sale. These sites work because they are bringing the searcher exactly what they want, no hassle or fuss.

Determining suitable products

Mini sites are all about balance finding products that people are searching for and are easy to compete in the SERPs the key therefore to our mini sites is research.

Keyword research is laborious and tiresome anyone who has done any serious niche blog development will tell you how many possible combination of subjects their are out there you would be amazed the number of extreme ironing websites there are. However we are at a significant advantage in that instead of the near infinite topics niche bloggers have we only have a finite number that of our product catalogue.

Using word tracker and Google trends

We will use a simpler version of a technique I use for finding niche sites but for the purposes we are using it for it will work perfectly. Instead of me explaining it I’m going to use a video from the Thirty Day Challenge which if you haven’t already discovered is a great little site.

Just a few points

• In the video they use a base line “male yeast infection” the reason is simply they know the approximate traffic for high ranking page for that term
• Wordtracker is US based so some keywords it will have problems with
• You can save yourself some time by using the Firefox or IE 7 search plugin for Wordtracker

So now go through all your products looking at both Wordtracker and Google trends and then for each one do a Google search jotting down the number of competing sites (as part of this you may want to also check your own sites current rank for individual products) You are looking for products with high number of searchers but small number of sites ranking for the term.

Hopefully you have been able to find 3 to 4 products so now its time to create your mini sites.

Developing mini sites

There are loads of resources out there for developing Mini sites and niche site’s some of the best are Quick Whois Mini site guide, and Net business blog Niche Case study. However before jumping in and setting up your site there are a few things to remember and watch out for.

• Domain names – The nice thing about a mini site is you can buy a nice highly targeted domain name however when thinking of domain names remember that you cannot use other companies brand names so for example even though you might be selling Heinz Backed beans you can’t use Heinz name therefore you will need to look for a name like backedbeans.com
• Make your sales direct – while we haven’t discussed your main site at all in this article you need to make sure that you can go from the mini site direct to the checkout in a single click, you don’t after all want to lose that customer
• Unique content – don’t just copy and paste your product description rewrite and expand it, also use pictures where appropriate.

Mini sites are a lot of hard work, however if you are running a large e-commerce store having 10 or 15 high ranking satellite mini sites will bring in a continuous stream of sales, allowing our to focus on the high traffic high number of retailer products on your main site front page.

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Lets face it Adsense is the major web revenue program out there but like all things it can be tweaked to get the best click through rate. So if you want to increase your earnings give these short tips a try.

Repositioning ads

Most people are ad blind is a statement you here a lot, I have said it many times and its true most people do ignore ads particularly if they are where they expects ads to be so how do you make people see ads simply put them where they are going to look!

http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm

You could also try using heatmaps to see where people click

Blending ads in

Use Link units Link units are great for putting in some adverts in limited space or if you want a more seemless blend in with the site and with Google upping the number of units on a given page to 3 these little ads can bring in the dosh big time. http://www.doshdosh.com/adsense-tips-and-hacks/ultimate-beginners-guide-to-adsense-link-units-optimization/

Improve relevancy

Have you noticed how your relevant adverts don???t seem all that relevant sometimes? When your developing your site its worth making sure your ads stay as relevant as possible. http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/11/16/how-to-improve-adsense-ad-relevancy/

Search for it

Use Google Custom Search Integrate your Google Adsense ads in your search results is an easy way to increase click through and with Google Custom search part of Google COOP its as easy as clicking the right link, of course you need to link your custom search into your site.
http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2006/11/23/custom-search-engine-google-ajax-search-a-winning-combination/