Official Google Search Tools

• Google – The Search Engine.
• Google Advanced Search – search google based on specific parameters
• Google Suggest – As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time.
• Google Trends – Graphically see and compare what the world is searching for.
• Google Personalized Search – make your search experience more relevant to you.
• Google Search History – Keeps a record of all searches and clicked results while a user is logged into a Google Account
• Google Blog search – Google search technology focused on blogs
• Blogger Blog Search – Search for blogs all over the web
• Google Directory – Search the web organized by topic into categories.
• Google Alerts – sends emails automatically when there are new Google results for your search terms.

Special Searches

• Google Video – Search TV programs and videos
• Google Image Search – comprehensive image search on the web
• Google Music Search – search for music
• Google Book Search – Search the full text of books (and discover new ones).
• Google Catalogs – helps you browse and search merchant-provided catalogs
• Froogle – Google’s shopping search engine
• Google News – Search and browse 4,500 news sources
• Google News archive search – provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives.
• Google Scholar – search for the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
• Google Patent Search – find the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you.
• Google Maps – View maps, get driving directions, and search for local businesses and services.
• Google Public Service Search – offers educational institutions and non-profit organizations worldwide free SiteSearch, which enables users to search your website, and free WebSearch, which enables users to search the Internet.
• Google’s University Search – enables you to narrow your search to a specific school website for things like admissions information, course schedules, or alumni news.
• Google Ride Finder – view taxi or shuttle locations in several cities.
• Google Base – submit all types of online and offline content that is hosted and made searchable online.

Google Topic Specific Search

• Google’s Special Searches – enable you to narrow your search to a specific topic.
• Google Apple/Macintosh Search – Search for Apple/Macintosh-related sites using Google
• Google Microsoft Search – Search Microsoft-related sites using Google
• Google Linux Search – Search all penguin-friendly pages
• Google U.S. Government Search – Search all .gov and .mil sites
• BSD Unix – Search web pages about the BSD operating system

Google For Webmasters

• Google AdSense for search – Opportunity to earn money by Google whenever your users click on the targeted Google adsense ads on search results pages.
• Google Free – provide Google search results to users who want to search the web or just your website.
• Google Custom Search Engine - Specify the websites that you want searched and integrate the search box and results into your own website.
• Site-flavored Google search – delivers web search results that are customized to individual websites.
• Customizable Google Search – you can customize your results display to include background, text and link colors you select.
• Google Search Appliance – is a hardware and software product designed to offer large businesses the productivity-enhancing power of Google search.
• Google Mini – Google search for your website and intranet

Google Desktop Search Tools

• Google Deskbar – Search using Google without opening your browser
• Google Desktop – a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed.

Google Mobile Search Services

• Google SMS – Send a text message wiht your search query, and receive text message with search results
• Google SMS UK – enables you to send queries as text messages from your mobile phone or device and easily get precise answers to your questions.
• Google Mobile : Web Search – Google Web Search results on your phone or mobile device
• Google Mobile : Mobile Web Search – search for sites that have already been designed to fit the screen of your phone or device
• Google Mobile : Image Search – Google Image Search results on your phone or mobile device
• Google Mobile : Local Search – get local listings, maps and driving directions on your mobile phone or device

Google Search Toolbars

• Google Toolbar – Add a search box to your browser
• Google Toolbar Beta – Test the latest version on IE.
• Google Toolbar for Firefox – Add a search box to your browser
• Google Toolbar for Enterprise – provides powerful productivity features including easy access to Google, customized search buttons, instant search suggestions, and a pop-up blocker.
• Google Browser Buttons – add to a personal toolbar giving you access to Google search technology without taking up extra screen space.

Third Party Google Search Tools

Search Google with Firefox Extensions

• CustomizeGoogle – enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).
• Googlebar Lite – A light-weight Google search toolbar for Firefox.
• GoogleTabs – Adds a context menu option to open Google search results in tabs.
• Advanced Dork – Highlight a word or phrase, right click, and choose from over 15 Advanced Google Operators, A google search page is opened in either the same tab or a new tab, the results contained in the search will contain the highlighted text inside the chosen Operator.
• GooglePreview – Inserts preview images (thumbnails) of web sites and Amazon products into the Google and Yahoo search results pages.
• Feeling Lucky – Performs Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search with any selected text and opens the result in new a tab.
• Aggregate Yahoo! and Google – Search Yahoo and Google simultaneously
• GooglebarL10N – is the localized version of Googlebar with Menues & Texts in German, Italian or Spanish.
• Google Advanced Operations Toolbar – provides a shortcut to some of Google’s advanced search functions.

Google Page Modules / Scripts / Widgets / Bookmarklets

• Search History – View your search history. Google Personal Module.
• Random Site Image – Displays a random image from a given website (via Google Images site search). Google Personal Module.
• Google Search Greasemonkey Scripts – use the power of greasemonkey to modify the web.
• Google Search Yahoo Widgets – collection of Google search widgets in various formats
• Milly’s Bookmarklets – Bookmarklets that use the Google search engine to search for stuff.

Multi Search Tools

• Simply Google – search all Google services on one page. Lots of forms.
• HotDaddy – search all Google services on one page. Lots of icons.
• Google Total – search all Google services on one page. Drop down menu.
• GahooYoogle – search multiple Google and Yahoo services together side by side.
• Twingine – Google and Yahoo search side by side.
• Soople – performs all advanced search functions of google in separate forms

Miscellaneous Google Search Tools

• Google Cloud – displays search results as a tag cloud
• Babelplex – enables users to search Google’s web index across two languages.
• Google Current – airs every half hour on Current TV and provides a look at what the world is searching for on Google.
• Googlewhack – a query consisting of two words (without quotation marks) entered into Google’s search page that returns a single result.
• Cookin’ With Google – allows you to provide a list of ingredients and get back a list of recipes that Google finds for you.
• Goofresh – is a way to search for sites added today, yesterday, within the last seven days, or last 30 days.
• Google Fight – Compare the number of results for two competing keywords.
• GoogleDuel – a popularity contest using the Google search engine.
• Random Web Search – it generates a random word, then searches that word on the web using Google.
• Googlematic – Enables searching of Google via AIM or MSN Messenger.
• Googlism – will find out what Google.com thinks of you
• Google Tool – Search multiple google datacenters simultaneously.
• elgooG – a mirror image of Google
• LostGoggles – adds search site preview images, Amazon pricing, site info links and the Open-in-New-Window-button. Formerly “More Google”.

The idea behind monetizing a blog is the process in which we customize the blog with ads to make money with our blog. If you’re not attempting to make money with your blog then you’re not monetizing it.

From my point of view every website you own should be monetized to make money, otherwise it is pointless to have and it simply takes up time that you cannot afford.

If this is your case then the below article is for you, but if you just like having some fun sites but your main goal is not to turn a profit from them then just skip this post and go directly to our SEO Tools section where you can learn how to do SEO to your site or blog and gain readers / traffic and stuff like that.

Basic Monetizing Principles

If your just starting to monetize your blog for some income then here are a few ways you can do that and get your feet wet.

Adsense

Adsense has long been used as a form of advertisements for monetizing blogs. However adsense only works really well if you receive lots of traffic to your blog already.  To find out more about Google Adsense check out our Google Adsense section.

Banners

Banners are your key to monetizing success, banners are what people will pay for our regular basis. Most banners run at a monthly fee meaning you get a recurring income every month. This is a great way to monetize your blog because the banners you place are going to be relative to your blog and you get to pick and choose what sites you want and don’t want on yours.

In Text

In-Text advertising is a new form of advertising which allows you more control over monetizing your blog. Basically the way it works is through programs like kontera which solely provide in-text advertising. In-text advertising is basically text links that have no-follow on them and when you hover on them as a visitor the site appears in a pop-up flash bar. It shows a screenshot of their website and if a visitor clicks on that flash ad you will get a percentage of each click! Anywhere from $.10 to several dollars per click, as you can see this is a great way to monetize your blog as its not in-your-face advertising as most visitors detest.

Text Links

Text links are the old way of monetizing a blog, people would sell text links for page rank, traffic and various other reasons. However now that the Google link penalty is in-place text links are of the past and not worth selling on a website. Instead replace that links section with banners and you’ll have much more success plus a better monthly income.

Reviews

Reviews are a great way to monetize your blog, you can charge any amount per review as long as your blog gets decent traffic and has a decent readership following. I have seen people charge anywhere from $10-$500 per review! Just be sure when doing reviews that you include a few negative ones as well, the reason I suggest this is because people love to jump on the negative bandwagon and there is no better way then with a negative review!

Summing it up

So the main point behind monetizing your blog is to make money, luckily for you we have tons of articles throughout the whole blog which explain various ways to monetize your blog and in turn earn money for those techniques you’re implementing.

One thing to keep in mind is that there is no one way to do it, feel free to experiment with different click and product affiliates, just because it doesn’t work for one person doesn’t mean it won’t work for another.

What about you? What ways do you monetize your blog? Do you make much money from monetizing your blogs? Tell us below!

This is done through the software developed by Google, which uses a cache of your web site’s page for either the keywords in the URL or the actual URL in order to determine the keywords that are most appropriate for your site. If the keywords have already been cached, the ads that are appropriate for the specific keywords is based on the bid system utilized through AdWords.

Getting Started with AdSense
Getting started with AdSense is a simple process. If you have a web site, you only need to sign up with the Google AdSense program. You can also choose to run ads in a variety of formats. For example, you may choose to only enable text ads on your site, or you may be willing to include ads containing images on your site. More recently, Google has also added the option to include video ads on the site.

Making Money with AdSense
AdSense is a pay per click form of web site monetization. Each time a visitor to your site clicks on one of the ads, you receive a certain amount of money. The amount of money that you receive depends upon how much the advertiser agreed to pay.

In order to improve your chances of making money through AdSense and in order to give the advertiser the best opportunity of reaching its target audience, Google uses some complex software applications in order to determine which ads will be placed on your site. Of course, the content of your web site is an important consideration, but the content alone is not enough. For example, the software determines the geographical location of the person visiting your site in order to display ads that are the most relevant to that person’s location

Why Businesses Would Want to Advertise Through AdSenses
AdSense is a popular form of advertisement because it helps the advertiser reach a more targeted audience. This is because their ads are placed on sites that are relevant to the goods or services they provide. In addition, AdSense advertisement is generally considered one of the least expensive methods for marketing. Finally, getting started with AdSense is easy. All a business has to do is visit AdWords, perform a little research surrounding the popularity and use of certain words, and bid on the keywords that are most relevant to their business.

Why Site Visitors Prefer AdSense to Other Forms of Advertisement
Most site visitors prefer AdSense to other forms of advertisements because they are not obtrusive or annoying. Many actually like these ads because they are relevant to the topic they are researching and can assist them with their search. Unlike pop up ads that get in the way of web navigation and need to be closed out, ads posted through the AdSense system are simply located to the side on the page. In addition, as the site owner, you can determine where and how you are willing to place your AdSense ads.

What to Expect When Signing Up with AdSense
After signing up for AdSense, your site will first display ads for charitable causes. Obviously, you will not receive money when these ads are clicked. After the Mediabot has the opportunity to crawl your web site, it will determine which types of ads are best for including on your site. At this point, relevant ads will be included on your site and you will receive payment when a site visitor clicks on one of the ads.

Maximizing your AdSense Income
In order to increase the amount of money you will make through the AdSense program, you will need to take steps to increase the amount of visitors you have at your site. After all, the more people to visit your site, the more chances you have of having your links “clicked on.”

There are several steps you can take to help increase the amount of traffic to your site. Getting other sites to display a link to your site is one way of accomplishing this, though it is important that you find quality sites to display your ads. The more popular are high-quality the site is considered to be, the better it will help with your search engine results.

Building quality content for your site is also a necessary step for increasing your site traffic. Not only will quality content boost your search engine ranking, web surfers will be more likely to revisit your site in the future. You can also include content that encourages your site visitors to click on the ads in order to learn more about a topic. Be aware, however, that you cannot explicitly say something such as “Click on my AdSense ads.” You can, however, refer to your advertisements or sponsored links in a general sense.

You can further monetize your site by including Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) ads as well. Care must be taken when working with both AdSense and YPN because these forms of advertisement are technically in competition with one another. While you cannot place ads from both AdSense and YPN on the same page, you can included ads from both companies on the same web site.

WordPress allows bloggers to easily integrate Google Adsense inside wordpressusing plugins. Google Adsensehas become the most popular online contextual advertising program and proper custom integration with WordPress can help to increase Adsense earnings.

Top Google Adsense WordPress Plugins

Listed below are 10 Top rated Adsense plugins which help you to be more efficient with wordpress.

• Adsense Deluxe – offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSenseor Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. Easily switch all AdSense ads to a new color scheme across the entire site.
• Adsense Injection- inserts Adsense code randomly into a pre-existing blog. Takes a random paragraph (or br tag) break in your article and inserts adsense code. It does one per story on multi-post pages (home, archive, category) and let’s you pick how many to show on single post pages.
• Adsense Inline- inserts Google adsense in blog posts.
• Shylock Adsense WordPress plugin- allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blogwithout modifying the template. Set it up to show different Adsense ads for articles older then ‘n’ days. E.g. insert a 468×60 ad at the bottom of a new article for regular readers, and replace with higher paying 336×280 ad after 7 days for the search engine visitors.
• Adsense Beautifier- makes your Adsense look beautiful by placing images beside them to increase your clicks (CTR) and subsequent Adsense earnings. (May not be compliantwith Adsense TOS now)
• AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar- Google AdSense widget designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.
• AdRotator WordPress Plugin – rotates your adsense adswith other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls wherever you want. Helps to reduce ad blindness and test different ad formats and affiliate programs.
• Adsense Earnings WordPress Plugin- displays your adsense earning details within wordpress admin panel.
• AdSense Manager- is a WordPress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets.
• AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System- allows you to view your adsense earnings and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors.
• Author Adsense WordPress Plugin – allows blogauthors to enter their Google Adsense Publisher ID and have ads displayed on their own posts generating revenue. Admin can set the ratio of author’s ads to admin ads.
• Author Adsense MU Plugin – Webmastersof WordPress MU sites can generate adsense revenue from hosted blogs as this script allows you to set an admin ID and the ratio of admin ad’s to blogger’s ads.
• Google Ad Wrap – wraps posts and comments inside Section Targeting tags for better targeted ads.

Google’s first appearance on the rough “war-theater” of search engines was in November 1997, when it entered in direct competition with the “big boys” of that time, Lycos, AltaVista and HotBot. Over the next few years, the popularity meter favors Google more and more, especially for it’s quick search methods and amazing technology. After gaining the position of providing secondary results to Yahoo from Inktomi in 2000, Google had a fast-paced ascent. Nowadays, Google searches through over 8 billion pages and serves 70 million searches everyday. Think it’s tough having a web page at the top of Google in these circumstances? Well it is, but if you follow the guides provided in this article you’re bound to have phenomenal success making your site popular.

Search Engine Ranking – General Tips

Following, are some general SEO tips that usually work for all search engines. Most of them include HTML editing, so it would be best if you knew the basics of HTML before trying to optimize your site.

Text versus images – because of the headache text and font causes for websites (because of the different browsers that have different fonts, MAC and PC differences, monitor sizes, etc.), a lot of web-designers fall in the trap of using images containing the text instead of pure formatted text inside the HTML code. Although it may provide a quick solution to layout problems, this practice causes two other major disadvantages, namely increased sized and the inability of search engines to look through your site (search engines look inside the HTML code for text, they cannot scan pictures). Therefore, it’s always better to work a little harder on finding the right text size and font, rather than using images.

Titles – whenever going through a page, search engines look at its title first, so make sure the page’s title contains the keywords people will most likely look for when searching. For example if your site is for a travel company, make sure you have words like “travel”, “vacation”, “holiday”, etc. Designers have a tendency to title their pages in an extremely simple and inefficient manner, like Homepage, Contact, Shop, etc. Titles should contain whole sentences with a high keyword density, giving the search engine more “tips” on finding your site. To insert a title to a web page, edit the HTML with any editor (Notepad would do), and place the title between the title tags in the head of the web page.

Keywords – Keywords are clues that search engines process and then rank your site according to keyword density. Keywords should be used both inside the site and in the head section of the HTML code. To place keywords in the code, you need to insert the following tag inside the site’s <head> section: <Meta keywords content= “insert your keywords here, separated by commas; you can place as many keywords as you want”>. For example, if you have built a site for a company that sells cars, you should place common words like “car”, “ABS”, “TDI”, “4WD”, “car prices”, “low car prices”, “Mercedes”, “Audi”, etc. Also, seeing how you can place as many keywords as you like, you should place misspelled words in the Meta tag, in case the person searching misspelled. For the above example, you could add “Mercedece”, “Audy”, etc. It might sound funny but you have no idea how many people misspell their searches and if you are able to think ahead on how people misspell words, you are bound to be the only (or one of the few) site owner that has a link on Google for those words, therefore dramatically increasing the chance for your site to get accessed.

The words in the Meta tags do not show up on a site. Also try to use the correct keywords in a high density throughout your site. The more instances of a keyword a search engine finds while scanning your site, the better the rank. If your page is optimized for the right keywords, the number of total visitors can double or triple. This comes as a complementary measure to take, besides a good internal and external linking structure, in order to improve the chances of your site being found on Google. Many websites fail exactly in this field, as their keywords don’t intersect with the searches of their potential visitors. The text within the body of your page – the visible text contained between the <Body> tag and the </Body> tag, should be roughly somewhere between 300 and 500 words, in which your key phrase should be used a couple of times and keywords should have a density of about 5% of the text.

Invisible misspelled keywords (not recommended, but it’s a widely used method – take notice that it could be dangerous to use cloaking text techniques, as some search engines may flag, or even ban your site for this) – Another tricky way to use misspelled keywords on your site, is to put all the wrong variants of your keywords in a couple of rows somewhere on your site, where it’s not likely to be seen at all (above the disclaimer, or somewhere at the top, just above the header), and change their color to the exact color of the background (if you have a picture as the background, you can’t use this method). The problem would be that if a visitor selects that text by mistake, he would see a few rows off misspelled words on your site, which undoubtedly gives a minus to your professional image. For example, I’m going to write a piece of white text here, try to select it: &133; this doesn’t look very nice, doesn’t it?. Now, depending on the browser you use, those words were highlighted and you can see their content, or they are permanently hidden and you can’t see what I wrote, it seems like you just selected blanks. For those curious readers that can’t see it, I wrote “: &133; this doesn’t look very nice, doesn’t it?..”. Again I do not recommend using this technique as it might be risky, but it’s as important to know what you SHOULDN’T do, as it is to know what you SHOULD do, sometimes.

Headers – Search Engines (and Google especially) take headers into consideration when ranking your site. The header tags go from <h1> to <h6> and are used to more easily split your website’s text into fragments. The biggest size is for <h1>, decreasing to smaller headers when using the following tags, until <h6> which is the smallest. You have a higher chance of rating higher if you use your site’s keywords or key phrases inside headers, especially the first two header tags <h1> and <h2>.

Meta Robot tags – a rarely used meta tag (or at least you can rarely find information about it in articles like this one), this meta tag “tells” a specific robot to index your page, somewhat increasing the probability and speed at which you will get indexed. Since adding it involves little additional effort, you might as well do it while you add the other tags. The tag shows a search engine the way to index your page and follow the links on it. The tag looks like this: <Meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />. In case you want to do the opposite and not let search bots crawl your site, replace “index” with “noindex”, or if you don’t want to let them follow your links, replace “follow” with “nofollow”.

Other HTML SEO tricks – There are a few more HTML tricks that send your site up the ranks. Using frames and pop-ups increase your rating on many search engines. The code for these HTML objects is quite long and complicated to explain here (as it is not the purpose of the article), but you can easily create framesets and pop-ups using a web-design program like Macromedia DreamWeaver or Microsoft FrontPage. Another tip would be the use of “alt” tags on images. The “alt” tag is the text you see sometimes when holding your mouse over a picture (most of the times a description of the picture). To use the tag, find the image source of a picture (e.g.:<img src=”picture.gif”) and insert the following attribute: alt=”description of picture”. It should look like this: <img src=”picture.gif” alt=”picture description” &133; >. This should make a small box, containing the “picture description” line, appear over the image if you hover the mouse above it. Search engines also look for these alt lines to configure your rank.

Google’s PageRank

Ranking high on Google is not all about HTML tricks – you need to create an attractive and useful page, something that people will want to come back to. If other web site administrators like your site they might post links to it on their own pages. All the external links your web page gets are analyzed and computed by Google through a process called PageRank, an innovative search algorithm that processes text information from their web page database a lot faster than other search engines. The higher you page rank, the closer you are to being in the top search results. A good rank can send your page somewhere in the first 50-100 search results shown by the search engine in a particular field. PageRank ranges from 0 t o10, with pages between 7-10 being considered high ranking in Google’s search engine.

Basically, PageRank works like this: using a mathematical formula, it calculates the number of links your site has to other web pages and their importance. It’s like a vote casting process, each link that appears on another site means a good vote and the importance of the vote is determined by the importance of the site that gives it. In Google’s own words (taken from Google’s FAQ):

“Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Below you will find the actual PageRank formula used by Google to calculate your web page rank. The amount of your PageRank, which you can pass on when you cast a vote (create a link to a different site than yours), is called a damping factor. The damping factor is known to be .85, and this is a little less then the linking pages own PR.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

PR(A) is the PageRank boost your page A will get after being linked from someone else’s site (t1). PR(t1) is the page rank of the site which links to you and C(t1) is the amount of total links that (t1) has. You should keep in mind that a page’s voting power is just .85 of that page’s actual PR and this gets spread out evenly between the sites it links to. The democratic process of ranking pages that Google uses doesn’t reduce the value of a pages rank when it casts a vote on another page. There is no way of transferring PageRank, so the action of linking to another page won’t diminish your own rank. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to calculate our Page Rank with the above formula, Google offers us an easier method. Your page rank appears in the Google toolbar, where it is constantly refreshed.

You should keep in mind that Google values a link by the ranking of the page it appears on, not the ranking of the site’s home page. A link from a popular home page will increase your own ranking more than a link from the same site’s secondary pages. If you want to see how many links there are to your existing web page, go to www.google.com and type “link” in the search box, followed by your page’s URL. This will give you a better idea where you stand in the Google ranking system. If the inbound links are few in numbers and come from unpopular sites you probably have a zero or very low PageRank rating. Studies have shown that the quality of the link is just as important as the number of incoming links to your site. If you get a link from sites like MSN or Yahoo, your website will grow in Google’s rankings, as you are now linked to very respected sites.

Another technique in finding high quality links is by searching for sites that offer site submissions. You can use the following lines in Google:<br>
“add URL” “your keyword phrase”

Also try replacing, “add URL” with any other of these search phrases:<br>
“add a site”, “add a link”, “submit URL”, “submit link”, “submit an URL”, “submit a link”.

The keyword being used to link to your site also plays a crucial role. When asking a site owner to link to your site make sure that you ask them to link with the keyword that you are optimizing that page for. A high percentage of the #1 web pages on Google result pages used the queried keyword in <a> link texts. Nearly one out of four web pages is a very high number so it looks like Google ranks web pages higher if they contain keywords in their <a> link texts. For example, if the keyword is “electronics”, the following <a> link text contains the keyword once:

<a href=”http://www.domain.com/page.com”>Electronics</a>

Linking, in addition to keyword density, should be the main concern of every webmaster that wants his site in a high Google rank. We will discuss linking options later on in the article.

Googlebots

Googlebots are small programs running on Google’s servers that continuously browse the Internet indexing web sites in Google’s main database. The Googlebots scan the cache of your web page and send the data back to the database. The easiest way to “attract” Googlebots to index your site is if you have a site map. The site map is probably one of the most important pages that the Googlebots can turn to, as the links contained their point back to your own web pages. This creates a trail that Google will use to trace the rest of the links to your site. You can find out if your site was indexed by the Googlebots, with the help of the Google toolbar. Check your Google toolbar to see if your page has been indexed. If the ranking value is zero, you should probably revise your web site’s design so that the Googlebots can find it (eliminate some of the Flash and see if that helps).

Another way to attract search engine bots is to have a small sized website. Keeping your website under 101kb is sure to attract Googlebots, if it’s much larger, there is a chance Googlebots will avoid it, as Google’s cache doesn’t go higher than 101kb. This is, of course, a general guideline, but keeping your site small you have several benefits besides that of easier attracting Googlebots: it will load easier, making it better for human navigation, it will be easier to manage and upload and it will be a lot easier to promote.

Besides the initial Googlebots launched by the search engine a few years ago, it seems Google has begun using another spider in their scanning and indexing of web sites. News of a second Googlebot was discovered by a number of site owners who, while studying their site logs, noticed two Google spiders; with different IP address ranges; visited and scanned their respective sites.

SEO – Linking

As we noticed earlier, the most important factor for getting a higher rank in the PageRank system is to have a complex and dynamic linking process (internal and external). There are several ways of making your link popular and having it appear on other sites:

Paying a specialized company – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Companies are a good option if you are willing to hand out a fair amount of money to rank higher in Google or other search engines, or if you find it to hard to take all the advices in this article into consideration for your site. This option could sometimes be a tricky deal, as SEO is always an unstable terrain and you might not get the desired result.

Link-Exchange -The most simplistic method after paying for the optimization is plain link-exchange. Basically it consists of two webmasters owning different sites, exchanging links and placing the counter-part’s link on their own site, thus increasing their rank reciprocally. You probably won’t have a lot of success if your site has a daily average of 10 visitors and you ask the Yahoo webmaster to exchange links, but it’s always a good thing to start low, exchanging links with similar websites (similar as in content and popularity). In time you will have your link spread in different places over the Internet and you can move up to exchanging links with more serious and popular partners.

Open directory listings – ODLs are special websites that index and sort other sites by category and content. The most important ODL is without a doubt the DMOZ Open Directory Project, where you can register your site for free and it will be checked for content. If the site is approved, it will be indexed in a category (for example “Commerce” or “Web Design”, etc.) where there is a chance someone will find your link and click it, or add it to their site.

All the people working at DMOZ are volunteers and their mission is to sort the good pages from the bad. They present the filtered pages back to the general public, focusing on high quality content for each site they review.

The information collected by DMOZ may be used by thousands of sites, and some of them may link to you. All these links score very low in Google’s PageRank but they are there and their numbers might add up to something that counts.

Post your link everywhere! – Whenever you have the chance, give out your link. If you spend time on a forum, place your link in your signature, if you write an article for a site, place your site’s link when signing it, etc. This is not only a good way to get your site clicked and get it popular, it also raises the chance of your site being linked to another one. Think about it, you’re posting on a forum with 2000 registered people, some of which are bound to have websites of their own or are managing someone else’s website.

Internal linking system – Use a well-balanced internal linking system. You can cross-link your most important pages in your site, so that the Google search engine sees them as relevant. If your website has hundreds of pages, the cross linking system makes it a lot easier for the Googlebots to index your pages quicker. You can also benefit from the use of the increased amount of keywords contained in the text links.

Google Dance

The “Google Dance” is the name given to Google’s updating processes when, for a short amount of time (hours usually) the ranks and the position of your site in the search engine “dance” up and down. The movement in the PageRank system is caused by the impossibility to update the information from over 10 000 servers simultaneously. Therefore, during the process, there is a chance that a lower ranked site was updated before a higher-ranked one, and until the latter will be updated, they will be bound to change places.

Up until 2003, updates were performed once a month, and during a few hours all ranks were distorted severely. Therefore, in order to avoid chaos inside their search engine, Google managed to find a way to continuously update its search engine, not only not causing the severe differences in rank anymore (they still occur today, but at a lower standard) but also making it possible to update more often, as the continuous update prevents any abrupt variations in rank. In case you see your page shift up and down the ranks in small intervals (maybe minutes or hours), you are probably just experiencing a Google Dance.

Google’s Own SEO Advice

Here are some quotes from the Google Guidelines found on the search engine’s website (www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html), regarding what you should do and what you shouldn’t do if you want to rank higher on Google’s PageRank.

“Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link” – this helps Googlebots index your page more easily. Not only that, but it gives readers a cleaner way of navigating. So by respecting this rule, you hit two targets with one shot.

“Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages” – again an advice that is useful both for human browsers of your page and for spider bots. The sitemap is a necessity for every major site around, since some can be so complex that visitors literally loose themselves on the site. It’s also the first place a spider bot looks, making it a valuable asset in the ranking process.

“Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content” – the importance of clear text is major for any site that handles a good amount of visitors. If you make your visitors loose interest by using spamming methods, un-organized text, etc. you risk dropping in the ranks, as visitor numbers are also calculated in the ranking system. The general rule for any site is that if the visitors like it and find it useful the search engine will do that too.

“Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it” – The relevancy of the keywords you use is crucial, so take some time to put together a list of what you think relates to your site.

“Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images” – We showed the importance of using text over images in the “General Tips” chapter. In some cases it seems almost critical to use an image rather than a text (for banners or site headers for example). You can however do a small trick that let’s you have a cool image as a banner and have the company name or other text, outside the image. If you have a pre-made banner with your company name inside, try to edit the picture and remove the text, than make a small table in the website (where the header used to be) of the exact same width and height the new empty banner has. Then place the empty banner as the background of the table and you can write whatever text you need over it. Just make sure the text is in the same position as it was before you removed it from the image. This works perfectly for keeping the same site design as you initially wanted and using text for the spider bots at the same time.

“Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate”. Don’t mislead the Googlebots and provide them with accurate descriptions of your page. Google doesn’t like to be tricked, so it’s a good advice to play by the rules in order to avoid being flagged, or worse, being banned. The “misleading” rule applies not only to Title and Alt tags, but also to accurate keywords, keyword spamming, invisible java text with misleading information, etc.

“Check for broken links and correct HTML”. Not only that in the visitor’s eyes, a broken link is a signal of negligence, but Googlebots or other crawler type bots can get mislead when indexing a page with broken links.

“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a ‘?’ character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small”. – The quote speaks for itself. Try to reduce dynamic code as much as you can.

“Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)”. – Again, this advice refers to the Googlebots’ ability to quickly index a page. If a page is too complex or has an unorganized structure, not only it will take a lot more time for the bots to crawl through the site, they might sometimes have problems, getting stuck between links.

“Avoid hidden text or hidden links and don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects” – like I already stated above, Google hates to be tricked or mislead. The use of java cloaking or invisible text columns (with irrelevant information, used just to obtain a higher rank or to get more visitors to the site) is strictly forbidden by Google, using this techniques at a large scale, might even get your site banned from Google’s search engine (meaning your site will never show up on Google, no matter what your PageRank score would be).

“Don’t load pages with irrelevant words” – same as above; using irrelevant text and keywords or key phrases only to trick visitors to come to your site is combated by Google. The strictest measures regarding this matter apply to pornography sites, which use irrelevant words to attract viewers to their page, possibly attracting children.

“Don’t create multiple pages with substantially duplicate content”. Google sees this as another form of spamming. Don’t worry if you copy a few paragraphs and insert them to another link if that makes sense, just don’t duplicate whole pages for the sake of having more internal links and more keywords.

“Avoid doorwa pages created just for search engines, or other cookie cutter approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content” – another “DON’T” on Google’s list. Doorway pages break pretty much all the above rules, being pages flooded with keywords, irrelevant texts, cloaked text, duplicate content, etc.

“Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header” – This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since it has last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

“Google may respond negatively to misleading practices like tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known web site” – well this rule could not only upset Google, but local or international authorities too…Misspelling of well-known sites or brands, is common on the Internet, so you can see web-sites marketing “PLIMA” sneakers, “Raebok” tennis rackets and the examples could go on and on. Misleading logos or banners are also common. The best example I found regarding this matter, was of a search engine named “Gogle”, which claimed to be the world’s most popular search engine (I didn’t include the link, for your own protection, as the site was crawling with Trojan viruses).

Google Site Maps Participation

To participate in Google Site Maps service you need to place a XML formatted file on your webserver. This file contains a list of all pages on your website along with other information such as page priority, update frequency and when pages have been modified.

If your web site does not have a sitemap.xml file you need to generate one now. The site below offers a Free Java based Google Sitemap Generator that can handle websites with up to 50,000 pages. Simply enter your website and in minutes you’ll have a sitemap that you can submit to Google Site Maps.

Generate Google Site Map

Visit Google Sitemap Generator to create your free Google Sitemap using Java.

You can also get an HTML sitemap as well which is also free, – This is one of the single most importnat things you can do to get your site listed with search engines. This is a must. There are no limits on pages, speed adjustments for creating site maps to avoid triggering firewalls and much more.

Yahoo Sitemap Generator

There is also an HTML Site Map generator that is ideal for those website owners looking to build sitemaps for search engines other than Google and serves well as a Yahoo Sitemap Generator.

Get your sitemap as soon as possible so you can get your web site on the road to success.

Earning money couldn’t be easier!  It’s a great way to monitize your webspace and web site owners, both new and experienced, are currently enjoying the profits from this new opportunity.   The web’s most popular search engine is now giving you the chance to earn some extra cash by simply displaying a few text ads on your web pages.  Targeted contextual advertising means relevant ads appear on your site.  When relevant ads appear on content pages, people click on them.  Google makes more money and in turn, you receive higher profits.

To join AdSense is 100% free and offers many benefits:

- Run ads that will interest your users.

- Customize the appearance of ads.
- Access a base of 150,000 advertisers.
- Manage your account online.
- Filter out unwanted ads.

AdSense Advantages

- AdSense is simple to join.

- It’s easy to paste a bit of code into your pages.

- It’s free to join.

- You don’t have to spend time finding advertisers.

- Google provides well written, highly relevant ads chosen to closely match the content on your pages.

- You don’t have to waste time choosing different ads for different pages.

- You don’t have to mess around with different code for various affiliate programs.

- You’re free to concentrate on providing good content and Google does the work of finding the best ads for your pages from 100,000 AdWords advertisers.

- It’s suitable for beginners or marketing veterans.

- AdSense provides simple, easy-to-understand stats.

If you have affiliate links on your site, you are allowed to add AdSense ads; However, with your affiliate links, you must not mimic the look and feel of the Google
ads.  You can also block ads for sites that don’t meet your standards or
that may be a competitor. 
Inevitably, AdSense is competing strongly for space on web sites with all other revenue sharing opportunities.

Many users of the adsense program have voiced their concerns about what they
would like to see changed or improved.  See the list below.

Adsense Money

So, how much will you earn from Adsense?  Google says:

“The AdWords ads you are able to display on your content pages are cost-per-click (CPC) ads. This means that advertisers pay only when users click on ads. You’ll receive a portion of the amount paid for clicks on AdWords ads on your website. Although we don’t disclose the exact revenue share, our goal is to enable publishers to make as much or more than they could with other advertising networks.”

..
The only way to know how much you’ll earn is to try it and see.  Because
there is not a long term contract, you may cancel at any time.

Information directly from Google’s Adsense program:

AdSense
overview

AdSense
FAQ

AdSense
tech FAQ

AdSense
policies

• 7 Search 100 top paying keywords  visit
• AdBrite – The Internet’s Ad Marketplace  visit
• Deep Link Ratio Analyzer  visit
• Google AdSense Sandbox Tool  visit
• Google Sitemap Generator – Free Java Site Map Tool, Creator  visit
• Google’s Sponsored Links Listing: Enter a term, and Google returns a list of all the companies who are bidding for that space.  visit
• Googspy: Enter a domain name, and Googspy shows you where the domain ranks in Google, and what Google Adwords the site targets.  visit
• Keyword Density Analyzer & PROMINENCE v1.2  visit
• Keyword Density Analyzer from searchengineworld.com  visit
• Keyword Density Analyzer from virtualpromote.com  visit
• Keyword Selector Tool – Not sure what search terms to bid on? Enter a term related to your site and we will show you: Related searches that include your term, How many times that term was searched on last month.  visit
• Labs.google.com, Google’s technology playground.  visit
• LinkShare Network – affiliate program  visit
• Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing) keywords and Overture/Yahoo bid amounts tool.  visit
• Reinclusion Tips If Banned From Google Or Yahoo  visit
• Remove your URL or Google Groups Post  visit
• Search Tool with Complete Page Analysis for each Result  visit
• SEO Chat – Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization  visit
• SEO Tools – Keyword Density  visit
• View Bids – Type in a search term and we’ll show you the Max Bids and listings for that term.  visit
• webpronews.com – eBusiness News  visit
• Yahoo! Link Harvester uses the Yahoo! API to let you find links pointing at a particular domain or individual page.  visit
• Yahoo! vs Google – See how a keyword ranks on Google vs. Yahoo in graphical format!  visit

http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp

Keyword Ranking MonitorInterest: give rankings and charts for an unlimited number of keywords in Google, Yahoo and MSN!http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords

Pagerank searchInterest: useful to select the pages on which to ask for adding one’s link because the results are ordered according to the pagerank of the pages.http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search

Co-op Advertising networkInterest: Banner exchange system that provides hard links for dynamic websites.Comment: Google and the other search engines don’t like that very much.http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/

Keyword suggestion toolInterest: Estimation of the number of times a keyword is requested in search engines ; figures are also provided for the most frequent other words associated with this keyword.http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion,
http://www.globalpromoter.com/seo-tools/multiple-keyword-counter.cfm
(allows multiple requests at once), http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

Pagerank and Alexa ranking for FirefoxInterest: The Pagerank remains useful to change pages for link suggestions and the Alexa ranking offers an assessment of the traffic of a website, as well as its world ranking.http://www.quirk.co.za/searchstatus/

Find the good keywordsInterest: Free software that list the pages pointing towards one’s competitor pages, and thus likely to point towards our pages.http://www.goodkeywords.com,
http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php,
http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php,
http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder,
http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer

Directory trackerInterest: allows to submit for free a website to directories.http://www.affmarket.com/?a=directories

Link Popularity CheckInterest: Assessment of the popularity of up to three websites.http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm,
http://www.rustybrick.com/link_analysis.php,
http://www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com,
http://www.instantposition.com/link_popularity_check.cfm

Find broken linksInterest: list broken links for a given website.http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

HTML Validator and spider simulatorInterest: a clean code is likely to help rankings in the search engines and a quick display of the pages.http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/meta-analyzer,
http://www.globalpromoter.com/seo-tools/w3c-html-validator.cfm,
http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php,
http://validator.w3.org

One-way link verifyInterest: automatically checks if a link pointing to our page has been kept or removed.http://www.webuildpages.com/tools/one-way-links.htm

Related terms toolInterest: gives synonyms and related terms, which may be useful to increase traffic.http://www.seomoz.org/tools/related-terms-tool.php,
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox,
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml

Ranking in Google, Yahoo! and MSNInterest: gives the ranking of keywords in Google, Yahoo! and MSN, up to the 1000th rank.http://www.googlerankings.com

Sandbox detection toolInterest: Assessment whether a website is affected or not by the Sandbox effect.http://www.seomoz.org/tools/sandbox-tool.php

>RankpulseInterest: Show changes in Google results for a selection of 1000 keywords.http://www.rankpulse.com

Traffic rankingInterest: assessment of the traffic of a website, that
is a good complement to Alexahttp://www.trafficranking.com

Links purchase and saleInterest: the Pagerank transmitted when buying those links can help rankings but it is often limited because the pages have many links (internal or external, which makes no difference).http://www.buyselllinks.com,
http://www.linkadage.com,
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com,
http://pradnetwork.com

Top 10 Google analysisInterest: analysis of the characteristics of the top 10 pages for a given keyword in Google’s results.http://www.webuildpages.com/tools/index.php

Robots.txt file generatorInterest : automatically creates a robots.txthttp://www.globalpromoter.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-file-generator.cfm

C-class testIntérêt : shows the C-class of a website, which is useful to take into account when using crossed Links.http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/class-c-checker.shtml,
http://www.webuildpages.com/cclass/index.php

Backlink Anchor Text AnalyzerInterest: Shows the text used in the backlinks.http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php

Cache toolInterest: indicates when the pages have last been cached by Google.http://www.webuildpages.com/cache/cachetoolpublic.pl

Yahoo! vs. GoogleInterest: comparison of Google and Yahoo! resultshttp://www.langreiter.com/exec/yahoo-vs-google.html

Keyword analysis toolInterest: show the most frequent keywords in a page and the keyword density.http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml,
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/kwda.cgi

Keyword difficulty toolInterest: assessment of the difficulty of a keyword, which can be useful when used with digitalpoint.com’s Keyword Suggestion Tool.http://www.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty-tool.php

Search engine listing simulatorInterest: shows how your page is going to look like in Search engine results.http://www.globalpromoter.com/seo-tools/search-engine-listing-simulator.cfm

SEO BlogInterest: Great SEO blog with tips that any webmaster will find useful.seomoz.org

PR 10Interest: list the websites with PR 10http://www.suchmaschinen-optimierung-seo.info/pagerank.html
, http://www.searchenginegenie.com/pagerank-10-sites.htm

Each website added to the network will be vetted by a person before any links are placed to ensure it meets the \strict quality guidelines. Should you wish to use your Vaultage quota to provide text link adverts to a website not in the system, then this website will also need to pass the vetting.

Link Vault is completely free and the set up is straightforward, flexible and easily customized. All the links are static, unless you delete them or the site is removed. You also have full control over the number of text links you receive.

Use Link Vault – Have you ever sent out emails to many asking for links and get only a small number of replies? Why not have a program that automates the task and even better still is not necessarily reciprocal.

The Link Vault is a PHP or ASP program installed onto your site with some code onto each page that you want links on. The program then adds up to 5 links on each of your pages. You then get given links on other peoples websites based on the Google PR of your and their pages.

The link vault is fairly new- started April 2005. Digitalpoint Coop as one method of getting additional links. Only problem is that the links are rotating, and Google is not so keen on links that are here today and showing somewhere else at the next moment. There can be initial high rankings drop once Google has realized that the links are rotating.

The link vault has:

• Permanent links – not rotating like the Digitalpoint co-op
• You build up your weight based on the Google PR of each page that has links on it. Vaultage is updated every half hour and vaultage is evaluated as pages are visited. It is therefore good to send a robot around your pages. But since it takes a while for vaultage to be used up, it doesn’t matter that the vaultage takes a while to accumulate.
• You don’t have to have links on every page – on the co-op you have to have links on every page.
• Weight is based on an exponential formula similar to that of the Google PR, so you get lots more for a PR5 than you do a PR4 etc. I helped with deciding what formula to use.
• Weight gets used up based on the PR of the page that links to you
• Links are added up to a maximum 20 links per day for any one url – Google prefers a gradual increase in the number of back links. Any large increase in links speaks of spam according to the April 2005 Google patent application.
• You have the ability to add up to 30 url’s for Link Vault sites to link to per domain. Additional with the referral system. Each url can have up to 3 different link texts pointing at it at varying percentages.
• A maximum of 5 of any one link , and a maximum of 20 links on any one domain – means there is not the risk of the Google same site penalty (too many links from any one site).
• The programming prevents their being recipricol links
• Any one site can’t have links on more than 50% of the rest of the network
• You can limit links to language (I recommend that you don’t limit, so you get the most possible links. Especially while the link vault is only in its infancy).
• Links and sites are personally vetted by link vault staff.
• No adult, gambling, weapons, pharmaceuticals, spam, general website directories, ‘offensive’ websites.
• Must be legal products, suitable for family audience, recognized by the main search engines, main index page recognized by search engines.
• Links are first added to sites in your category – based on the demo top level categories. Then links are added to other sites within the Link Vault.
• You get credit for the best PR of 20,000 of your pages
• Every site you add to your account gets treated as a referral (see following post). I was instrumental in getting this feature added. Previously it was only on actual referrals.
• You can specify that you don’t get links from sites on your account to each other – this is important so that your sites don’t get treated as being the same site by Google – in this case only site would get shown for a query.
• You get shown the Link Vaultage that has been used for each of your pages receiving links – this is very useful in deciding when to stop adding links.
• You get shown the total links that have added per domain, and number of url’s you have per domain – able to access the links sorted by domain via a drop down menu.
• Links are given to you in as fair a method as possible – PR0 links first, then ever increasing. The total number of links available and their PR’s are known by the Link Vault. They then distribute these links in a pyramid fashion. ie With 40 links they will spread over 4 different levels of page value in a pyramid fashion.
• The date is shown that you added the site and had it approved, and the date you added the url’s to receive links (added around 20th May 05)
• Clicking on the links does a Google search for that phrase.
• If you take the max links down to less than what you already have – Example: one of the links set to a max of 100. It had 75 ‘links placed’ then reduced max down to 50. Then the ‘links placed’ went down to 50. Those 25 links are removed are the most recent links added (being the highest vaultage). You get the vaultage given back to you.

Click Here for more information

Thanks to Hermin Mattson for submitting this informative article!