Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Getting links to your website is essential if you want to have a good position in the search results, certainly with Google the overall linking picture is the biggest influence on where your pages end up showing, or so they say. The trouble is that over time it has become harder and harder to attract links that Google will value, or so the story goes. With this in mind when it comes to my clients I am very strict on the types of links I build, for some appearance and reputation are perhaps even more important than SERPS positions and with these I am extra careful.

One good example is a company I’ve been working for a year now, because of the sums of money involved (per transaction) it is more important for them be completely above board than to rank number 1 for everything. But why should these 2 things be mutually exclusive? In that year I have build over 400 natural links to their website, all of them on target and related via personal communication with other webmasters. The results although not spectacular are good, from PR1 to PR3 and from no natural search traffic to several thousand visitors. On average they rank about position 20 for each of their main keywords and in the top 10 for all long tail targets. More importantly to the client the traffic converts and all metrics are on a steady upward rise.

I was a bit miffed though this week to receive a link request from a competitor who although only being going several months is already ranking above us. A little bit of checking shows that they’ve done it by gaining tens of thousands of spammy links in a very short amount of time. Thanks Google. As far as I’m concerned their spam site shouldn’t be there but obviously Google doesn’t agree. It seems that all links are good, no matter how bad. I suppose this makes sense, if a link could negatively affect your ranking then what’s to stop people scuppering their competitors efforts by paying for links from a bad neighbourhood? Although Google claim that these links will be of NO benefit I have the feeling that they do provide some tiny tiny amount of benefit in Google’s algorithm. Enough of these and hey ho you’re jumping above legitimate competition. My belief is at some point they will eventually start slipping back down the results, but that is only based on blind faith in Google.

So here’s the question, when it comes to linking does slow and steady legitimate linking really win the day or do you see better results by having huge amounts of non relevant links?

This last 11 months has seen some of the most amazing ups and downs of my life, one day it looks like I’m finally going to achieve the financial freedom I’ve been fighting for the next it looks like I’m going to be looking for a normal job again (days like today). One day I clear more than $1000 the next it’s $100 and all without any apparent pattern or reason. Making a living from the internet is not easy, there is no guaranteed pay cheque each month, what works one week may not the next, even when you do nail it the rules often change plus the more you begin to make the more people are looking to put you down! The strange thing is that it is this freedom to flourish, this uncertainty, this stress that made me want to leave my Civil Service ($45,000 a year salary, 30 days a year holiday, up to 18 days flexi leave a year, 11 bank holidays a year) job behind. I only lasted a couple of years of tearing my hair out at the lethargy around me, it was those years that gave me the incentive to get my little money earning part of the web in place so that I could not only support myself but my family.

Perhaps what I find strangest of all is that whenever anybody asks how I’m doing they all assume that money pours into my account with free abandon and I spend all day dossing about. Of course there are the slack days, but then again they are far outweighed by the 18 hour work days, days of sourcing links where there appear to be none, of squeezing that last little bit of on the page SEO juice out, off chopping and changing for the hundredth time to try out that new network that could be “the one”, of answering the swearing filled support e-mails from people who have downloaded your stuff, off writing new content on a subject that has been covered 1,000,000 times by everybody else, the list goes on and on. I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world though, making that break for freedom was the best thing I ever did, and just like every other roller coaster in the world this one sure as hell has the ability to grab you by the balls and remind you that you’re alive!

I’m a big fan of WebCEO, it’s a great suite of applications to help you with all aspects of managing your websites. Whilst there is no substitute for experience when it comes to SEO the optimisation tool within WebCEO is a great learning tool to start you on the path to becoming an SEO expert. That’s not what I’m going to concentrate on today though, it’s the ranking checker tool.

Now I know a lot of people use ShoeMoneys search ranking checker but even the free version of WebCEO has a tool which is much more powerful. The Shoe’s SERPS tool is great for getting a quick snapshot of whether or not a domain ranks for certain phrases but WebCEO expands on this idea to give you the following advantages:-

1. History tracking so you can see how you sites performance has changed.
2. Compare your results to your competitions
3. Show how many search results are returned for that phrase
3. Group keywords under baskets
4. Show which page ranks for the chosen search phrase, this is very helpful in making sure the pages you want to show for a certain phrase appear highest in the search rankings.
5. Check against local versions of search engines e.g. Google UK
6. Schedule your ranking check
7. Export your report to a variety of formats

To give you a small example of how powerful this tool is I’ve done quick example report for the ProBlogger website checking for 3 search phrases, “blogging expert”, “blogging for money”, “blogging tips”

WebCEO really is one of those applications that you’ll use all the time once you’ve got it, I use the pro version but even the free version is well worth having, after all you can’t beat free!

So you think you know your SEO heh? SEOMoz.org have an expert SEO quiz, now please keep in mind that this is quite a serious test, 75 questions and expect to take 20 minutes or so to complete it but it’s well worth doing.

I was happy with my score of 95% although I could probably argue with a couple of their answers on what I got wrong. Never mind at least it gives me a cool name:-

SEO Dark Lord – 95%

Are you an SEO Expert?

I’ve just had this delivered to my inbox, gives a great basic overview for SEO from some of the leading professionals in the field.

I haven’t been able to find a lot of information online about using IIS to host a SEO friendly website so I thought why not fill people in with my mistakes.

The very first website I created for myself was hosted on an IIS server, for 2 main reasons. Firstly I came from a commercial background of writing core web based business systems, Microsoft technology ruled the roost and ASP.net, SQL Server and IIS was something I did day in and day out. Secondly IIS was the web serving service that comes with Windows operating systems, this gave me an easy way of developing on a test environment. I should probably point out that I was far more concerned with writing something clever with my first website, the concepts of SEO, actually having visitors and making money were not something that even entered my head. Nowadays my initial thought when creating a website is “how much money can I make doing this”. When you start thinking like that then IIS has some obvious disadvantages.

SEO And IIS

When it comes to maxing out your SEO here are a few of the problems you’ll discover when using IIS:-

• Case sensitivity – Linux based servers are case sensitive, IIS is not. Whilst at first this may seem like it’s easier to develop (doesn’t matter how you type your links) the effect on passed link value is bad. Google and the other search engines will all treat Index.html, index.html and inDex.html as different documents, with Linux the wrong one will return a 404 error but IIS will just let it go. What you end up with is link love split between 2,3,4,5 variations of your document.
• URL Rewrites – So many of the content management systems out there (think WordPress, Joomla) rely heavily on URL re-writing to create search friendly URLs. It is well known that too many parameters turn away search engines, unfortunately IIS do not support the .htaccess behaviour that makes fixing this problem a cinch. Instead you’ll have to rely on complicated 404 replacement fudges, or more likely just live with your non SEO friendly URLs.
• Hosting – I can only base this on my own experience but I’ve found that many hosts try to cram more websites onto a IIS server than a Linux based server. As demand requires they usually host less IIS machines and so IP duplication can become an issue if you try to link between your own websites. For example if you open 5 accounts with a host the chances are you would end up with 5 different IP’s because your accounts would be on different servers. If you did the same with IIS hosting, because of a lack of hosting servers you’d more likely than not find all your accounts on one machine and one IP.

IIS and Making Money Online

If you primary concern is making money from your websites then IIS is not the way to go. Given the chance to start over I’d go for Apache and Linux all the way, these are just a couple of the reasons:-

• Cost of Hosting – Making the money is easier if you keep your costs down, Windows hosting costs more than Linux hosting.
• Better Access To Free CMS – Almost every free CMS, Forum Program has been written with Apache, MySQL and Linux in mind.
• Easier SEO – See Above.
• Cheaper Programmers – If you do need to hire in help the rates for PHP developers tend to be cheaper than those for Microsoft fan boys.
• Faster Page Loads – Ooooh controversial. Given the same page to render on the same hardware I’d put my money on a Linux /Apache system beating the pants of a Windows/IIS server any day.

It’s not that I don’t like IIS, in fact I love it but I’m a very strong believer in the right tool for the right job. Writing big business n-tier intranet, extranet or internet systems then I’d always favour .net, IIS and SQL Server. For making money from small to medium sized websites then Apache, PHP, MySql and Linux it is.

This isn’t the sort of post I’d normally make on a Sunday, throughout the world of blogging Sunday is known as the slack day for off-topic posts. Just so as many people as possible get to see this I’m going to keep it as the first post for a lot of Monday as well.

SEO Factors

So what’s all the fuss? DealDotCom‘s product today is titled “SEO On-Page Factoring Guide” and they want to charge you $25 for it. In case you haven’t guessed already it’s another e-book, sigh! It’s going to tell you about what on the page SEO factors affect your ranking and how to use them to increase your search engine rankings. The question is would you pay for this information? If the answers is yes then you’re not using the internet to it’s full potential. I’ve always said that it’s very easy to make a profit if you’re not spending money so here are a couple of ways of getting the same information without spending a penny.

1. Download WebCEO. The optimisation tool will analyse and recommend the ideal densities in all key areas of your page content (Title, Meta Tags, Headings, Page Body). Not only are you getting the same information as in the e-book but it’s constantly updated to keep it current.

2. You want to know what SEO really affects your SERPS rankings. Read this page from SEOmoz several times until it all sinks in. What is worth and isn’t worth changing is all in there for free. It’s the considered opinions of some of the top people working in the area of SEO so take advantage of it.

If you do find that you are desperate to spend money on an SEO e-book then the only one I’ve read worth the money is the SEOBook. It’s not cheap but I’d rather spend $79 on something worth owning rather than $25 on rubbish.

I’ve known about the SEO Book for a long time, in fact I use the keyword research tool found on the same website on a regular basis. I guess I’ve been put of buying it in the past for a couple of reasons:-

1. As a paid SEO consultant how much can it really teach me?
2. Nearly $80 is expensive for any book, let alone an e-book

Faced with a hangover from hell on a miserable Sunday afternoon I decided that a little bit of light reading would be just the order of the day so it was Paypal account to the ready and away we go. Was I impressed, hell yeah!

First, Middle and Last Impressions

I can’t really say this is my first impression because once I’d started I couldn’t stop and I spent 4 hours reading all 331 pages of it in one go! In short it’s brilliant. This is not an e-book written by a professional writer but instead by somebody who obviously knows the ins and outs of SEO, as it stands today. Aaron claims to be earning consultancy fees of $500 an hour, judging by this book it’s no wonder. The great thing is the no nonsense approach to SEO, every consultant worth his or her salt will tell you that for most businesses SEO is a long term process, it’s certainly not a sprint. Of course you can attempt to game the search engines, some much easier than others (Aaron isn’t afraid to let you know where spammy techniques really work) but on the flip side there’s also the good chance that a short term game in one engine will result in long term difficulties with others. This is brutally honest information. You will not find any guaranteed top 3 rankings in 5 days nonsense in this book. It’s all very informative and perhaps even more importantly is current, reading this book for me was like finding a kindred spirit in the world of SEO. It confirmed the knowledge that I thought I knew giving me the extra confidence to just carry on what I’ve been doing for several years now.

Perhaps the most informative part of the book for me was Aarons grasp of page rank, link love, website relationships, whatever you want to call it. You want to know how the search engines really relate one page to another then it’s all here. For even experienced pro’s a thorough read of this section will no doubt either reaffirm your current ideas or perhaps teach you something new. Something else that jumped out at me that I wasn’t expecting is the gold mine of links contained within the book. Everything from useful SEO tools to extra sources of information are all featured at the end of each chapter, no doubt at all there is enough information to keep anybody busy for several days. All of a sudden the $79 price tag is not looking too bad! This only scratches the surface of all the content that the book contains, it’s your all-in-one guide.

So my $79 bought me a book that should really be considered an ultimate guide to legitimate SEO, not only that but some nice extras in the form of interviews with other SEO experts and a couple of tools that Aaron uses. I already have my own favorites but anybody showing a new interest in SEO will find these valuable. When the world of SEO changes again so will the SEO Book and it’s free updates for life. As if this wasn’t good enough there is a 90 day no worries money back guarantee in place. I can hand on heart say that I’ll not be taking advantage of that, I’m more than happy to have paid $79 for the SEO Book