Monetize Pro

People not involved in website optimization often have difficulty to understand search engine optimization and the different methods that are involved. If you have to explain the basic SEO concepts to your boss, the following list will help you:

1. Link building is important

Links are like votes for a website. The more votes a website has, the better the rankings.

2. There are different link types

Search engines consider the relevance of the links. Links from unrelated websites don’t help as much as links from relevant websites. A link from a website that has many inbound links for itself counts more than a link from an unpopular website.

3. It’s important to keep on link building

It does not help to get more links than your competing web pages. At least one of your competitors will continue to build links and pass your website. For that reason, it’s important to know that link building is an ongoing activity.

4. Buying links can get you in trouble

Search engines don’t like paid links because they consider the links to your website as editorial votes. Google has officially stated that it considers paid links as an attempt to game the system. Google penalizes websites that buy links. Even if Google cannot automatically find all paid links to your website, your competitors might report your website.

5. Redirects can cause trouble

Redirects have been used by spammers in the past and some search engines still have difficulties with that. If you have to use redirections on your website, only use 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is the only server side redirect that is defined as a permanent redirect. That means that search engines will follow the links and pass the links from the old URL to the new URL.

6. Duplicate content can cause problems

Search engines want to return as many different results as possible in their results. That is why search engines only list one copy of a document in their search results. For that reason, you shouldn’t promote more than one domain for the same website and you should have unique content on your web pages. Near copies are also considered duplicate content, for example, when the same article is listed on more than one website.

7. Why your web pages must be optimized

Search engines use simple software programs to index web pages. These web pages analyze the text on a web page to determine what it is all about. If a keyword is mentioned in the right places and in the right frequency, search engines will consider the web page relevant to that keyword. If a keyword is mentioned too often, search engines might penalize a website because it looks like a spamming attempt.

8. Keywords are the key to your success

It’s important to choose the right keywords for search engine optimization. Single word keywords can be very popular but they seldom lead to sales. Industry specific keywords can be so special that no one searches for them. The perfect keyword is targeted, has a high search volume and leads to sales.

Search engine optimization is not rocket science but it requires some work and ongoing efforts. If you understand the basic SEO concepts, it’s easier to get top 10 rankings on Google and other major search engines.

During the last weeks, people in online forums observed some strange Google result changes. Rumor has it that there is a new -60 penalty that Google applies to websites in which it has lost trust.

What has happened?

Some webmasters found websites that were listed on position 61 in Google’s search results that had Google Sitelinks below their listing.

Normally, Google only displays Google Sitelinks for the first search result. Many webmasters believe that the website that was listed on position 61 with the Sitelinks was the number 1 result for that keyword but had been penalized by Google.

What does Google say about the -60 penalty?

In a Google Groups discussion about showing Sitelinks for #61 results Google employee John Mu referred to a -60 penalty discussion. Google hasn’t officially confirmed that a -60 penalty exists. However, Google employee John Mu indicated in a discussion about the -60 penalty in the official Google groups that Google penalizes websites if they contain certain spam elements.

Which spam elements trigger the -60 penalty?

It looks that Google applies this penalty to websites that buy links. Many of the websites that seem to have been penalized had many inbound links from websites that linked to them from every single page of their website (so-called site-wide links). Sitewide links are an indicator of paid links, which Google sees as an unwanted way to artificially inflate search engine rankings.

The head of Google’s anti-spam team Matt Cutts has often said that websites that buy paid links will be penalized and it looks as if Google tries to do the job properly. If this penalty for paid links really exists then even websites that follow Google’s rules can get in trouble. Your competitors could harm your website simply by buying links or by creating mini-net websites with sitewide links to your website.

Instead of penalizing seemingly “bad” links, Google should simply ignore them. That way, people could not harm competitor websites.

Finally it is here, the TNT guys were late on this one! Ordered this mobile phone 2 weeks ago and since yesterday its mine The Sony Ericsson W910i is a nice stylish mobile phone with a lot of options. It has a 240 x 320 pixel screen (262.144 color TFT), which I like very much! I can also add RSS feeds to it and all that kind of stuff. (full specifications here).

Unfortunately I was not looking to buy a new phone, but my old phone suddenly died so I had no choice! Also looked for the iPhone, but here in the Netherlands it is not available yet. Also check out this sony ericsson themes site! So this is my new phone:

And I love it! Alexa recently updated their rankings algorithm and now they finally updated the statistics again. Before this algorithm update alexa was only accurate to websites that had a tech savvy audience, people with the alexa toolbar installed. But now it is getting info out of more sources, which makes the rankings more accurate and more trustful!

Check out this image from Alexa explaining it in an image:

Personally I like Alexa way more than pagerank! But in the end it comes all down to traffic. With this new alexa algorithm you won’t find a site with a good alexa and low traffic (at least, that’s what I hope, otherwise the algorithm change was not that useful). Give me your shouts about this!

This was something I was doing for the last 2-4 weeks. Making up excuses why I was not making any decent money and was not working on my sites. Currently the money that is made on the net is at a low point and I was making excuses for it. Why am I not making money? Because I don’t work at my websites! This is the only excuse that is true!

That made me decide to get a new theme for new energy! Recently I also bought a fairly large xbox 360 forum which is not monetized at all (yet). This forum is good but does not have many good search engine rankings nor traffic. It needs more backlinks (relevant links), that is why I bought a halo 3 blog! It was up for sale for a very cheap price, holding a pagerank 3 and currently making $10 a month on adsense. I will update this blog like 5 times a month and link to sections at the xbox forum.

But for now: no more excuses for me!

Yesterday I noticed an interesting post from Shoemoney about the future of SEO. He got interviewed about this subject and one of the questions he got asked about was what he thought about the future of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Shoemoney is pretty clear about this question, he thinks SEO has no future. SEO will die because of the voting on toolbars, analytics reports, geo statistics, social bookmarking etc. which is affecting the rankings more and more these days.

My point of view is a little bit different though. There will always be room for SEO, it will not die completely! I agree with shoemoney that other factors are becoming more and more important, but I cannot agree on this line: “So in my opinion there just is no future in current SEO for Google anyway.” It is good that he mentions “in my opinion” because I think there will be always room for good proper SEO and it is all about relevant links. But who am I?

Anyway, if you think SEO will not helping anything anymore in the future, please stop optimize your pages so my pages will have a better change on ranking higher