Make sure you read to the last. I have something for you at the end. You shouldn’t miss it.

The Micro Niche Marketing project has been going on very well. I have decided to reveal the name of the niche I am working the project on as well as the URL. But before that, let me give you some stats. I have focusing on about 5 main keywords and about 15 long tails. Among them, 5 keywords have already entered the Google Top 100 list with one keyword hitting the second page of Google. The main keywords, the last time I checked were on the 80^th page of Google. It is going to take a long time to make it to top 100 as the domain is brand new and has very few backlinks. The link Building process is an ongoing one.

What I have done is, prepared a total of 20 articles and timestamped them with an interval of 5 days till the 15^th of March. This way, I do not have to pay attention to its growth and the blog will be updated regularly. Thereafter, I plan to update the blog just once a week, to keep the SE crawlers busy.

Okay, now to unveil the secret.

The niche blog I am building is on Acne Cure. I researched the most profitable micro niche keywords having low competition within Acne using Micro Niche Finder. The software made my job a snap. Visit Acne Cure Blog.

My brother sent me this news piece about the Tumor man. His name is Huang Chuncai and he hails from southern China’s Guangdong province. Take a look at his pain.

Huang Chuncai poses before his second operation to remove his tumors, which currently weigh around 10kg (22lbs), at a hospital in Guangzhou, southern China’s Guangdong province, January 3, 2008. Huang, a 32-year-old native from a remote village in China’s southern province of Hunan, says he is relieved after a part of his facial tumors, which originally weighed about 23kg (50.7 lbs), was removed last year. His second operation will remove another part of the tumors, which weighs 4.5kg (9.9lbs). Huang suffers from Neurofibromatosis, which is a genetic disorder of the nervous system that primarily affects the development and growth of nerve tissues. Picture taken January 3, 2008.

I honestly cant fathom the depth of his pain. Anyways, I will leave you all with this thought.

Great Sunday
Al

Sunday Blogbits – The Tumor Man

According to Dan Thies, there are 4 goals to keep in mind, while working on the structure of any website.

• Logical Structure

• Dynamic Linking

• Anchor Text and Reputation

• Improve Index Penetration

Let me cover each one of them in brief. Mind you, this is a very important part of the process we call “Search Engine Optimization”. People are so obsessed today with Link Building PageRank that, they have forgotten some of the fundamentals that are equally or more important to gain SERPs. So, pay attention.

Logical Structure – This step is geared towards improving visitor experience in your site and making their journey across it easy and friendly. After all, the primary purpose of any website is to attract visitors, to interact with them, gain their loyalty and hopefully turn them to leads, customers or simply, loyal readers.

According to Dan, the Logical Structure makes up of 3 components. The Home Page, The Roadmap Page or Categories and the Destination Page. Technically he calls them The First, Second and the Third Tier.

The Home Page is the obvious door for your visitors to enter your website. This is where the impressions are built. If the visual structure such as an introduction, sidebar navigational links, etc are in proper place, you have captured your visitors attention. The Home Page is also the area that gets bookmarked more often for future references. The “First impression is the best impression” principle has to work here.

Next comes the Roadmap page or Second Tier. This is the Categories page that organizes information in your site and assists the visitors in reaching their end goal. According to Dan, it is preferable to have at least 5-7 categories leading to relevant sections of the website. This enables better organization of the information in the site. The second tier also consists of a Sitemap page that clearly lays out links to every page in the website.

Lastly comes the Destination Page or Third Tier. This is the ultimate goal of your visitors. The easier it is for them to find this page, the more they will be convinced about your site. So, basically from the Home Page to this, it is about a 1-2-3 clicks. The visitor is happy.

Dynamic Linking – This is all about internal linking and preserving Link Juice, while not compromising visitor experience. In a nutshell, Dan introduces the dreaded “No-follow” tag and goes to show how it can be used effectively to control the PageRank flow in every page’s outbound links. Dan believes that it is very important to control the PageRank value of each page and that one should not unnecessarily waste it by sharing “link juice” to less important pages in a website.

A simple example is the Privacy Policy or the Terms of Usage page. You will notice that on a typical website, every page footer will carry links to this page thus passing some PageRank value to them. These 2 pages are there for human visitors to know more about your company policies, etc and have no Search Engine value whatsoever. It is important that a well optimized site avoids this error. In the earlier days, this was a task by itself, but today it is just about a No-follow tag. By placing a no-follow tag on the above 2 links, a lot of Link juice can be preserved and concentrated on a more important page of the website.

The no-follow tag in short helps eliminate links from an SEO point of view, while at the same time, retaining it from the visitors point of view.

Dan also explains the importance of Sitemap page for SEO purpose and believes that one should limit the outbound links from a Sitemap page to 150. He reasons this from his experience that Search Engines do not crawl beyond 150 links in a page. I won’t argue as I have no experience there.

Apart from this, he discusses the Third Level Push, Tiered pairing and the Circular navigation. You have to read it to understand it.

Anchor Text and Reputation – We know how important anchor texts are on inbound links. Today Search Engines place a lot of importance on the keywords used on the incoming links. Dan discusses about using the same strategy when cross linking within a website. For example if you have a page that sells Red Widgets, try linking from other relevant pages of your site to this page using the anchor text “Red widget”. Of course, there is a limit to how many times you can do this, but if you can link in this fashion from as many relevant pages from your website to this page, it will help in SE rankings. Just don’t overdo it.

There is more to this discussion than what I have mentioned. Dan talks about Global and Section navigation, Contextual text links and others. Again, read the book.

Index Penetration – This is the last goal while optimizing website structure. Dan explains the need to get all the pages in a website indexed. Not doing so simply means that those pages won’t come up in the SERPs. He attributes the problem to in-effective linking strategies and poor internal link structure. He discusses Google’s supplemental index, which I believe is no more relevant anymore.

It is at this point that Dan discusses how important PageRank is. If your browse the worldwide web for information on PageRank, you will notice everyone criticizing it, and calling it a “useless innovation”. Dan’s argument changes this perception. It is the level of PageRank that decides the ranking factor for your website. SEO experts talk about paying attention to Link Building and not bothering with PageRank. In reality though, what do Inbound Links really do? They build your PageRank value and thus improve your site index in SEs and give you better SERPs.

Take my Advice. Read the Book.

Optimizing Website Structure for SE Rankings

I decided it was time for some action. I fired up a mail to them hoping for a clear cut reply. 2 days later, the reply was at my inbox. I read it. I was happy. They were pretty clear. They did not have a problem, but had certain conditions. They always have. Here is the question and answer session, straight from the horse’s mouth.

Hello,

I have a very important question. Is it okay for me to place Google Adsense and Bidvertiser.com ads in the same page? Bidvertiser said they are fine with it. I want to know what Google says.

Please answer at the earliest

Thanks
Al

Google Responds –

Hello,

Thank you for your email.

I understand you’d like some clarification on our competing ads policy.

AdSense publishers may display third party advertisements on sites and pages showing Google ads as long as the formatting or color scheme of these ads is sufficiently different from the layout of the Google ads. In other words, if you choose to place non-Google ads on the same site or page as Google ads, it should always be clear to the user that the ads are served by different advertising networks and that the non-Google ads have no association with Google. If the formats are naturally similar, we’d ask that you use different color schemes for the competing ads.

For additional questions, I’d encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center ( http://www.google.com/adsense_help ) or the official AdSense blog ( http://adsense.blogspot.com?utm_source=txft ). Alternatively, feel free to post your question on the AdSense Help Forum (

http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help?utm_source=txft ).

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

All those of you, that were in doubt; you shouldn’t be anymore. I am positive the above has cleared it all. So, make changes if you have to and follow the rules if you wish to be in Google’s good books.

Great Weekend
Al

Weekend Talk – Google Adsense and 3rd Party Ads

No more! After four years, indices merged, and now once again, Google calls upon its entire database to match queries with pertinent listings. Sounds good, yet after initially rejoicing, you may wonder how will the merging of the two indices affect your pages SERP (Search Engine Results Page) now that the competition has risen from the ashes, adding billions more pages? Perhaps Google doesn’t love us, after all. Probably so!

First and foremost, Google loves its’ users. Users comprise of businesses, students, shoppers, and families. They connect to the Internet via devices, and it is probably safe to say that 5.6k modems are becoming more of a novelty. Today, most users connect via high speed cable, satellite, and using mobile devices. They drive powerful machines (desktops, laptops) with plenty of RAM (Random Access Memory) and storage, measured in gigabytes. They interact with peers in real time and add their own content to the web with video, blogs, posts, music, and photos. They individually and collectively contribute to a moldable active web rather than staring at a static one.

Reason enough to challenge Google’s ever evolving new services, gadgets, and open source projects etc. Yes, even Google needs to expand and fine tune its services all the time. That’s why I am not surprised that Google terminated the superfluous index in favor to its entire database, enabling to collect and compare a world of information rather than just a sliver of it.

Now let’s get to the question of how Google’s powerful new search capability affects web pages. I say, aside from eliminating the stigma of the supplemental index, not much has changed. Proportions have changed, that’s all – more pages more results. The good news is, RSS feeds don’t get indexed any longer, reducing duplicate content automatically for your websites or blogs. Yet as before, good pages will make it to the top of the Google index; others may end up on the SERP #365,000 or so. In summary, the problems that sunk pages into the supplemental index or hell, so to speak, still remain. Although, those low ranking pages are once again in the system, making it much easier for the webmaster to get them back on track to Google’s first page.

Oh well, wouldn’t you rather deal with the competition than trying to rescue pages out of a sand box never knowing all the little secrets on why they have gotten there in the first place? I would! What do you think?

For good Google SERPs do the following:

• Keyword/keyword phrase research
• Include keyword/phrase in title

Avoid duplicate content:

• Publish original content

• Redirect http://site.com – to http://www.site.com (* see WP plugIn)

• Edit robots.txt file to pages you don’t want spidered and indexed (admin or about pages)

Google Webmaster Central Blog

Duplicate Content Url Issue

Redirect WP plugIn

All In One SEO pack

Google Supplemental Index Re-visited

This case study was basically an inspiration I received after purchasing Micro Niche Finder. I decided to run a live experiment to rank a Micro Niche keyword in the first page of Google. I already did my research in the beginning of last week and picked up a fairly profitable niche that has about 50,000 per month search count in Google and an exact match result of 800,000. I am sure you are keen to know the niche, but I fear the Devil. I have already received a threat:

So, I have decided to keep the niche a secret at the moment. Let the ball roll and I will reveal it. I have chosen 4 other keywords apart from the main niche word to rank for. The following are the tools I will be utilizing extensively all through the experiment:

1. Micro Niche Finder: Though the initial job of finding the Niche market is over, I will continue to use it to find better keywords to rank for, within the niche.

2. Keyword Elite: I will use it basically for Keyword research purpose. Very helpful tool.

3. SEO SpyGlass: This tool will help me spy on my main competitors and give me an idea of the level of competition and help me gauge my progress.

4. Rank Tracker: This software will enable me to research my keyword positions in Google and other Search Engines on a week by week basis.

I have decided to go with a Wordpress Blog rather than a static website, simply for SEO reasons. The following are the plugins I plan to use on the Blog.

1. Akismet anti-spam

2. All-In-One-SEO

3. Challenge

4. Google Analytics

5. Google XML Sitemap

6. Maintenance Mode

7. Open Web Analytics

8. Permalink Redirect

9. StatPress

10. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

11. Duplicate Content Cure

12. WP-Sticky

Each one of them has a purpose in assisting me in my journey. I have chosen them after careful consideration.

Domain name: I had a choice of registering the perfect domain name for the niche, but instead I went to TDNAM and picked up from the Live Auctions there. You ask me what is the benefit. I did it mainly to avoid Google’s Sandbox and delay the results. The domain I now have is over a year old and is indexed in Google. It also has 4 active and related backlinks from a Pagerank 8 authority source. Lets say I was lucky. It cost me just $13. The owner probably wanted to do away with the name. I was his messiah.

My goal is to have about 50 pages of original and quality content in the Blog. I have found a Lady writer from the U.K who has agreed to deliver the content. I can probably settle for 10 pages of good quality content, but I want the SE spiders to visit the Blog regularly and in order to maintain their visits, I need to feed them good content constantly.

I plan to maintain a posting interval of 1 article every 3 days. As of now, the Blog has no articles at all. I plan to post the first one tomorrow and take off from there.

I know this post was pretty boring as it contained pure facts and no spice. But stick with me and I promise you will love it. It will be a great opportunity for you to gain live “as it happens” knowledge and someday probably repeat the experiment on a personal level to make your fortune on the Internet.

Stay Tuned!

Sunday Blogbits – Micro Niche Marketing Case Study Part 1

Then it all changed.

I decided not to pay anymore. I wasn’t really happy with the performance reports, coupled with errors and database downtimes. I decided to explore the free world. In a matter of couple days, I found what I was looking for. The perfect statistical companion(s).

Let me share them with you.

Before I proceed, here is a piece of advice. Never rely on any one Analytics tool. It is important to have at least 2 different logging tools to gather vital information about your blog’s performance. That said, I use 3 different tools to satisfy my statistical needs.

1. Google Analytics
2. Open Web Analytics
3. Blog Stats from Auttomatic

Google Analytics: This is my favorite tool, no doubt about it. But I use it a bit differently. I login to my Google Analytics just about once a week. I do not use it to see how many visitors I have received on a given day. Instead I use it purely for the purpose of analyzing the incoming traffic, the quality of the traffic, their sources, the keywords used to arrive at my blog, the different locations people have arrived from, the bounce rate, the duration of their stay and more.

I am sure you want to know more about how to use and benefit from Google Analytics. Go to my homepage and download my book “ABC of Google Analytics. It is free and comes with zero strings attached.

Open Web Analytics: My absolute favorite for real time visitors statistics. It was founded by Peter Adams about whom you can read everything here. This tool has the look and feel of Google Analytics, while providing feature rich real time analytical tools. What disappoints me is the fact that this Web Analytics tool hasn’t received the exposure it really deserves. The first time I installed, I was really amazed at what I saw in the Dashboard. Here are a few screen shots.

Auttomatic Blog Stats: Blog Stats is the third Analytics package I use. This is something I refer daily, for the purpose of finding out if there is something that OWA has missed or not tracked. At the end of the day, I cross reference both of them and study both the data in brief to conclude the average figures. I definitely like this a lot, but do not trust the figures as much as I trust OWA. OWA is number 1 in my book for real time web analytics. Here are a few screen shots again for Auttomatic Blog Stats.

The above 2 packages come in the form of Wordpress Plugins. You have to download them and upload it to your Plugin directory. For information on how to upload a Plugin, refer to my post here. Again, the Plugins mentioned above are free and have no strings attached.

To conclude, you do not really have to shell out money on Analytics packages. They all have one or the problem and none of them are perfect. I have to add this briefly. My recent experience with pMetrics was pretty bad and depressing. I do not want to go in detail about it because the guys behind pMetrics are solid individuals with excellent morals and dedication. They are striving hard to improve pMetrics. So I am positive, in a few months it will emerge out a winner. Until then, it simply sucks.

Try the above combination and let me know. I can tell you for a surety you will love them and also that you won’t look back again at any paid packages sold in the market. Do share your experiences in the comments section. I can’t wait to hear them.

Do you pay for your Analytics package?

Before I proceed, I assume your blog has at least a couple posts for the Search Engines to devour. If not, go ahead and fire up your creativity and pen down an article or two.

Lets proceed.

Google Webmaster Account: Google Webmaster Central is every Blogmaster’s traffic arsenal, if utilized properly. This in reality is your first step to getting indexed in Google as well as going forward, a good ranking in the same. In layman’s term, Google Webmaster Account is a simple set of tools created by Google to help Webmasters and bloggers optimize their sites for better Search engine crawling experience.

Here is what you have to do. Go to:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Create an account there or use your existing Gmail account. It will work perfectly. Once you are logged in, this is how the overview looks like:

You can see the list of sites I have added already. It is pretty simple. You can see the header called Dashboard. Right below it is the box where you type the URL of your blog or site and click “Add Site”. Here is a bigger picture.

Google will add your site to their crawl database and provide you certain information in the next page. Here is the info I got:

It is telling me that the blog I submitted was crawled last on December 12^th. It is also telling me that some of the pages from my blog have already been indexed. Of course, if your blog is new, it will be different.

Next, you have to verify to Google that your blog belongs to, of course you. In the overview image above, you can see a rectangular box with a message -

“Verify your site. By verifying your site you can access comprehensive statistics and crawl errors about the pages in your site”

Click on the link Verify your site. You will be given 2 options for verification. You can either add a meta tag to your blog’s index page or upload an html file with a name provided by Google. Once done, a Google bot will crawl your blog and look for the file you uploaded or the meta tag you added. Upon confirmation, you will received a verified status in your account.

Next, you have to add a Sitemap of your blog to your Webmaster account. Wordpress has a popular Sitemap Plugin called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator. You can get it here. Upload the Plugin to your Wordpress Plugin folder, go to admin panel -> Plugins and activate the Plugin. It will create the Sitemap automatically. By default, your Sitemap URL will be -

http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

So, once you have setup the Sitemap Plugin, add the above URL to your Google Webmaster account. On the left of your account, you can find a link called Sitemap. Click on it. In the next page, click “Add a Sitemap”. You have a choice of 4 types of Sitemaps to submit. Choose General Web Sitemap from the drop down. The page will expand offering you the option to add your Sitemap. Add your Sitemap URL and click “Add General Web Sitemap”. You are done. Google will show a pending notice and will activate it after it has verified, a process that completes in about an hour after submission.

We have won half the battle so far. Another half and we have conquered our space in the Search Engine Land. Yay! Yay!

Essential SEO for your blog and posts: This is the next step. You need to optimize your blog with very good title and description so that when the Search Engines that you released from your Webmaster account come, they can recognize the potential in your blog and hopefully offer it to the visitors. Your blog will get indexed even otherwise, but will not come up in Search queries because you haven’t briefed your SE guests what your blog is all about.

You can’t afford to do that can you? Nope, you cannot.

You have 2 options here. You can download your index file and add a meta description and title and a few keywords and then repeat the process for all the subsequent posts and pages you create, or, if you are smart like me, you use a Wordpress Plugin called All in One SEO. I have written a separate post about it, which you can find here as well as the link to the Plugin.

Pinging Social Bookmarking Site: Since the advent of Social Marketing, Social bookmarking sites like Technorati, Ice Rocket and many others have become extremely popular in syndicating blog contents in their database with a public display option. These are Social Bookmarks. Unlike your private browser bookmarks, these are available for public viewing, which means, these are accessible to the Search Engines who crawl these Social sites several times in a day, which simply means you are creating another outlet for Search Engines to access your content.

How to set this up? I have explained in another article that you can read here. Read it, and set it up the right way.

Social Marketing: Some believe this medium has just gained popularity and some others believe we are closing another bubble burst. Whatever be the opinion, this medium can be very helpful in not only getting your content out to the world, but also in building backlinks and getting your blog contents indexed.

Social Marketing sites are highly visited by everyday people to read news and all sorts of odd information and so they have a very high placement in Search Engines. Google Bot and other Search engine robots roam freely in these sites all the time, indexing whatever content they come across, unless they smell spam. So, your best bet is to submit your posts to several of these sites so one of them can deliver them to Search Engine robots. Again, I have written a How to article here. Read it. Implement it.

Miscellaneous: Create a robots.txt file in the root directory where your blog is installed. Robots.txt is an important file that Search bots crawl when they visit your blog or site. This is a text file in which you can type in certain commands that the bots will follow. In case, you do not want the bots to index a certain post, you can inform them through robots.txt. In addition to that, the Sitemap Plugin uses Robots.txt file to inform the bots about the Sitemap. So, create this file and do not forget to give it write permission, so the Sitemap Plugin can input info.

Once you have done the above, wait for the Search Engines to come to your blog and hopefully pick your content and index them. From hereon, it is a game of patience.

How the Pros do it: Getting your blog indexed in Google

Well, as of yesterday everything seems to have come back to normal. Sites that had a N/A result at digpagerank.com are now clearly showing their PageRanks again.

My personal opinion is that there never was a second round of PR update. Google probably was updating all their servers around the world and they were not relaying the information out. So the PR sites couldn’t determine the figures and showed results as N/A. One of the sites I checked showed me the result as “This site is not in Google’s cache” when in reality Google had cached the site on November 4^th.

To conclude, the only tool you can trust to verify your PageRank is the Google Toolbar itself. If there is a change or update in PR, Google will export the data to the toolbar and it will show up pretty fast.

Google fixed the PageRank error yesterday