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Feb 25 2009
Court, Keywords, SEO and Common Sense
I picked a lousy time to start a new blog. For those who don’t know my story I live in the remote Canadian wilderness where our only form of transportation is by airplane for 10 months of the year. During February/March we do have a winter road built across the lakes and through the forest in order to supply us with a years worth of supplies. The truckers are upon us right now and I’ve been occupied with my incoming freight at all hours of the day or night - my apologies for being a bit tardy on the comments and posts.
Just a quick post to introduce those of you who are not familiar with Courtney Tuttle and Mark Butler. There are very few marketers that I agree with when it comes to making money online and even less that I read. Quite simply I learn by experimentation and don’t follow anyone else’s path. Having said that - if I was starting out today I could save myself a lot of trouble by following the advice given out freely by Court and Mark. They share my desire to help others, they understand SEO as well as I do and they provide real information that will work for anyone who wants to do the work.
I urge you to take 5 minutes and read Court’s latest post at the Keyword Academy - a to the point kick in the butt that many of you need in order to quit “researching” and get into the game.
The freight should be done in a few days and I’ll be back in business. Till then enjoy Court’s post and most of all - take some action. How many of you signed up for a Today.com blog and haven’t made a post yet?
Cheers,
Griz
My today blog is already rockin’, I am an action-packed link building fool right about now and I’m just getting warmed up.
The more action I take, the less I need Griz to post again. Though of course I drop everything when he does!
I got my today.com blog setup with graphics etc. and made a few posts. I like the system and hope it pans out well.
Too funny Griz, I was kinda glad you wrote a short post today. How twisted is that? Saw you in my reader and thought, “Ah man, I gotta stop and read this!”
I just finished setting up 10 domains on my hosting account to get some niche sites going this month. You’re definitely right about Mark and Court. I made my husband read part of Court’s post. I think he might be starting to catch on that there might be a method to my madness.
You provide such a wonderful service to many of us that I doubt anyone would hold it against you for getting in your freight. Ah, the wilderness. It makes me fondly think of my time in AK. Enjoy.
Guilty, sort of…I applied for an account at Today.com but they denied me. Guess my blog was too IM for them. Any suggestions on getting approved?
Lin Burress: read this on Griz’s Make Money Online for Beginners blog about when to add AdSense.
I have been trying to get a Today.com site but the new member page keeps updating. Not sure what the issue is?
OK, I’m testing the waters with a about a 3 week old blog. It has some content. I think the layout is good. I’m now just trying to get it indexed. I’ve done a G search on my keywords, which turnes up related sites then I put backlinks within commnets on other blogs. I’ve also claimed my blog and pinged technorati yet I’m still not seeing the site get indexed. Griz, can you help? Someone? Anyone? Right now I just want to get it indexed, I can work on getting it moved up in the ranks, I think I’ve got a good foundation just want to build on it. Can someone show me, steps 1,2,3?
Thanks.
BK, Griz has talked about all the variables when looking at competing sites. For one thing, Google never reveals more than 30% of its links, so the other 70% might contain a perfectly anchored backlink from a PR5 site. Yahoo reveals 100% so it’s a rough guide but it won’t tell you exactly what G is thinking.
What tool are you using? I’ve found that Yahoo Site Explorer (which is what SEOquake and SEO for Firefox use to count backlinks) returns many times the number of backlinks I get in SEO Elite. I won’t get into the relative merits of the various tools here as there’s a long discussion on the MMOB blog on that topic. For me personally, when I check competition in SEO Elite, 99 times out of a hundred the backlinks reflect the SERP results. It’s really fun now that I can see behind the curtain.
Anyone else around tonight, please jump in and correct me if I’m wrong about Google’s 30%. I try to only spout off when I’m sure, but it’s easy to get this stuff wrong. I was just over at the Warrior Forum and someone had posted a long diatribe warning against checking competitors’ backlinks with SEO Elite because Google will catch you and lower the PR of your site. WTF!!! Talk about the deaf and dumb showing their a** to the blind.
rgBlog01, Court and Mark have a nice discussion on getting indexed at their site on make money at the Keyword Academy.
Folks, do you have some huge fluctuations in the traffic from Google in the last 4 days? I am just asking because I have…lost almost half of my traffic.
Oops… a bit tardy with the comments. I shall attempt to catch up now.
Frank,
I’m not worried about motivating you. lol. I’m glad you still remember how to write “real” posts!
mdc,
As Lissie mentioned this is an old version of Wordpress and it is really easy to use as they don’t give you many options. Drag n’ Drop - Cut n’ Paste is about it. If I figured it out in 5 minutes the rest of you should take about 3 minutes…
Skinnyninja,
You have been busy - well done. Have you been building links as fast as you have been posting?
Mattmorr,
So is writing about Lawncare as exciting as watching the grass grow? Lol.
Andy,
It’s nice to hear you are making progress and earning a little coin in the process. Good stuff and keep at it. Thanks for the props.
Lissie (Passive Income),
Yup - I am on an island and the ice road is our lifeline. I imagine it is all a bit strange for a Kiwi/Ozzie like you! Btw - we hit 40 below zero the past two days and Australia is sounding sweeter by the minute.
Sorry for the short post. lol (It will give you more time to fail though…)
Costa,
Unfortunately the beer gets a bit skunky after 6 months so we end up flying it in during fishing season - a pain as it costs more to ship it than to buy it - about $75 a case for the guests! Do you still want a taste at that price?
Potato Chef,
The process of making money online is quite simple - targeted keywords and targeted backlinks. That’s it really.
The hard part is collecting all those backlinks and staying motivated long enough to see the results. In a lot of cases the hardest part seems to be getting started - as Court mentioned - too much research tends to create paralysis.
Chelle,
I finally gave in and started using Analytics myself as G was pushing all of their Adsense accts to use it. I may be wrong but I believe the Adsense stats in Analytics is a new feature and yes, it does have a few handy features. Most notably the ability to track which keywords produce the best results. In fact I started this blog to aid my rankings for the term “make money with Adsense” as it is one of my best paying keywords.
Amanda,
Just for that the next post is gonna’ be a looooong one!
Mikael,
The powers that be have some pretty mixed up ideas as to who they allow to join. Targeting users to N. America makes no sense other than ethnocentrism - can only Americans write discernible English? Hardly.
Sorry for that - rather embarrassing I think for Today.com
Wear Many Hats,
AK? - Arkansas? Is there wilderness there?
Myln,
Technically no - however I still find .com the easiest to rank well.
Gmoney,
Did they give you a reason for denying your application?
Hi Lin,
I’m glad you are going to get into gear and as Lorecee pointed out - I have a post regarding when to add Adsense - hope it helps.
Lorecee,
As usual - much thanks for the help!
Denise,
I’m not sure either - have you tried again? Let me know if you still can’t sign up and I’ll open a ticket to find out.
CD Rates,
Thanks for the tip - I had no problem with Firefox when I joined. Don’t even remember if there was a Pop - up.
BK,
Without more info I would just be guessing. I need the urls to check properly.
RG,
The quickest way to get indexed is to get a link on an authority site or at least one that gets crawled often. Ezinearticles should do the trick - post an article there with a targeted link pointing back to your site.
(I have a habit of linking back to sites that write posts linking to one of my various MMO blogs - assuming it is relevant - nudge nudge…)
Lorecee,
I don’t know about the 30% number but it is true that Google does not reveal all your indexed links. It is very possible that the top ranked site may have a few decent anchored links that G isn’t showing.
As I said to BK - there could be many factors for those rankings and without the urls I couldn’t begin to guess.
As for checking backlinks with SEO Elite or any other tool you can run the risk of having your IP banned for a day due to overloading their search function but this has nothing to do with having your PR lowered. You are quite right - the Warrior forum like every other forum is home to beginners and full of crap advice given by people who don’t do any work - they spend all their time on forums.
People who do - do, people who don’t do - talk about it on forums. A huge time sink and responsible for all the nonsense out there when it comes to making money online.
Mike,
Your niche may be going through a serp shuffle at the moment. Google is continuously shuffling it’s rankings niche by niche on a rotating basis. It is always temporary as it weeds out all the spam sites. If it is a serp shuffle you can tell if the total number of competing sites listed on top of the serp page has changed significantly.
For instance the term “how to make money” usually has about 40 million competing pages - at the moment G is showing 190 million competing pages. This happens every time it shuffles the deck and usually last a week or so then returns to normal.
Hey griz,
this is what I received from Today.com. Pretty general. Lame!
We received your application and would like to thank you for your interest in
being a professional blogger at Today.com. After carefully reviewing your
experience and qualifications, we have determined that we do not have a position
available which is a strong match at this time.
There are various reasons why this may be the case. Some of the more common
reasons are listed below.
- we have a limited number of new positions available monthly
- we may have already accepted several bloggers in the topic for which you applied
- the suggested topic may not be a good fit for Today.com at this time or could be too broad or narrow in interest
Thanks again for considering Today.com. We wish you well in your endeavors
and hope you might consider us again in the future.
Griz,
I see you made it to the first page of google for “how to make money with adsense” and “make money with adsense”. How did you do that so fast?!?!?
Lorecee, Griz,
I use several tools, SEO Xray, yahoo and a browser based one that works well (it shows me anchored keywords). They all agree on the backlinks. The 1st spot may have some hidden backlinks that dont’ show in the tools, but I doubt it has 100.
I understand there are other factors for Serp ranking but my understanding is that nothing can beat anchored backlinks. However, somehow position one in the serps for this keyword is owned by a company that does not have many backlinks and 0 that are anchored. The company is a household name and is a major player in this offline service niche.
Just does not make any sense
Griz,If I put adsense does that exclude other things like Amazon and Clickbank?
Griz,
As someone who did inventory for five years, I feel for ya. I look forward to your next post and digesting some more information.