Latest nofollow stir

After it was announced that nofollow no longer blocks page rank lot's of people made a lot of mess about it. My advice is simple: if its not broken, don't fix it.

More on images in posts

As outlined in previous article, the images are real burried gold, when it comes to search engine traffic.

My latest find is this: alt text doesn't matter that much at all.

What does?

Filename.

Make sure the filename is made out of your keywords, separated with dashes.

There you go ;)

Images in Posts - The Unrevealed Treasure

Recently I created a site for test where my goal was to include an image in each post. I made 50 posts and got the site indexed. Site started getting some search engine traffic then after 3 weeks explosion happened.

Site suddenly started getting around 1000 visitors per day from Google Images alone.

I've put some Adsense on it to see if that will convert - result is $15 a day :)

Amazing considering the whole site cost around $150 to make.

Outsource, Outsource and Outsource

Let's face it. A busy netvestor will have a dozen of sites under his belt, and managing them all can be really hard. From reading analytics data, managing adsense and adwords to SEO and marketing, you will be done pretty much for the whole day.

That's where outsourcing comes into play.

You can find very cheap services offered at DigitalPoint and to some extent SitePoint Forums from article writing, link building, web design, site installation etc. The latest deal I got was to install a WordPress blog and write 50 articles about a niche for $200. Those 5o articles will give you unique content for almost two months. And if you did your keyword research well, you can be sure that you traffic will start to climb slowly but steadily. At very least if you are not satisfied with the site you can sell it at the same forums to get you investment back. To sell a site for $200 it will need to make around $0.50 a dey on adsense in average.

Outsourcing prolongs your day from 24h to 48h. Start using it now.

Hubpages are really great

I have been doing a lot of experimenting with hubpages and I can say they are really great.

Find a longtail low competition keyword, and create an article about it on hubapges. It will rank extremely well, extremely fast.

Online dev platforms experiment continued...

In my first post I outlined six online development platforms and decided to make a test by creating the same page on all of them and see which ranks better.

After ten days have passed, I have some preliminary results. Best to rank for hidden word 'lovtexmes' was weebly site and then the standalone site cutecoco.com.

Best to rank for the whole keyword was cutecoco.com with around position 550 on google (yes terrible).

But there seems to be another contender in this game and the things get really exciting.

Roundup of six online website development platforms

I have been doing research lately in order to find a best free website development platform on the net, suitable for business of website investing (with zero investment in funds).

I have had a lot of success with Weebly, but it has it's limitations. So after extensive research I have come up with a list of six sites:

1. Weebly.com
2. GooglePages.com
3. SynthaSite.com
4. Jimdo.com
5. SiteKreator.com
6. Webnode.com

All these site have in common the fact they are free to use, provide some kind of web site development tools and are also ad-free. That means all the ads on the site will be run by us, unlike on sites like Squidoo or Sampa.

You can read a review about Weebly and GooglePages in my previous posts. Out of the new contenders SynthaSite and Webnode seem to have most potential, with Jimdo following and SiteKreator on the back end.

In order to test the sites development and SEO capabilities I have created an experiment. A test page that I shared on all of these platforms. That way I can monitor website ranking for the same keyword and notice which does the best. The keyword phrase I am targeting is "Love Text Messages".

Here are the sites:

• First Love Text Messages Sythasite
• Second Love Text Messages Weebly
• Third Love Text Messages Googlepages
• Fourth Love Text Messages Jimdo
• Fifth Love Text Messages SiteKreator
• Sixth Love Text Messages Coco
• Seventh Love Text Messages Webnode

I have also included a self-hosted site on a domain cutecoco.com for comparison purposes. So the game is on and I'll be closely monitoring the results these platforms provide for their sites.

Running adsense through an iframe widget

This is a little known adsense technique used to accomplish two things. First is to run adsense with precise keywords that you select, and second is to run adsense where otherwise it would not be possible, like for example on Weebly.

As you know problem with weebly is that it does not support direct Javascript inserts. Adsense code needs to be pasted in the same format you get it. But weebly reformats it when you paste it and thus makes it unusable.

However weebly supports widgets and there is an adsense widget that allows you to configure your ads.Pretty much the same way you would normally. Enter your adsense publisher id and channel id (to track performance), decide on the size of the widget (give it a little room for ads to display) and choose your keywords. When you are done just paste the widget code into weebly's custom html component and there you have it, adsense running on weebly or any other similar development platform. You can see ads running on Wii Finder.

Running Adsense through a widget has one crucial advantage mentioned before. You get to choose exactly what keywords you want Adsense to run on! As long as you have keywords that target your page's content you should be all right with adsense TOS. I have written to adsense support about it to make sure, and truth be told they did not give me a straight answer. It was in the lines of "Thanks for trying to make sure you are withing adsense tos. Please take a look at help and google groups for an answer.". I posted the questions in adsense group but nobody answered. The widget author says it's legal, Google didn't say it wasn't so I guess it is 75% sure.

Wake up call: Stop reading ebooks, time for action!

I have a question to ask you at this point in our little journey. Do you consider yourself a serios Website Investor? Have you read all about research, development and marketing? If not go ahead and finish reading those first.

If you did, have you actually put to practice tips given there? Have you researched your keywords? Did you build a site? What was it like promoting it?

Reason I ask you all this is simple. This blog can be read as a one big e-book on Website investing. Like all e-books out there, you will find it useful, you will accept many of ideas and you will learn something new. But it is worthless until you actually do something about it! I want to urge you to stop reading e-books for a while and start doing some live action!

The best way to learn something is by practicing it. If you do not spend equal time in practice as you spend reading theory, you will be simply overwhelmed with information and you won't be able to act creatively. Your creativity will be put to hold, sealed in a corner of your brain. You have all this information at your disposal, yet are unable to find a simple way to start. This can be very frustrating if not prevented on time.

So start today and start small... Research your keywords. If you did, build a site using proper SEO techniques. Apply some of the tips and tricks I told you about. If you did then it is perhaps time to do something about marketing.

Have a great netvesting weekend!

Two best search engine ranking tips I can give you

What we all want is that our site ranks high on search engines for terms that are searched relatively often. This brings free and targeted (people interested in those keywords) traffic to our site.

While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big and complex science nowadays, there are two basic tips I can give you that will significantly improve your website rankings. To more experienced SEO guys they will look awfully familiar as those are two most mentioned tricks in the book, but they alone account for 90% of your rankings. That is the reason I am bolding them.

First tip, is use your keywords as often as possible, as natural as possible. That means put them in titles, bold them, put them in footer and interlink your pages using your keywords as anchor text. However always remember to use natural language as much as possible because what matters the most at the end is user experience. There is no point in ranking first and getting thousands of visitors that stay about 10 seconds on your site.

Second tip is create links to your website. There are several basic ways to create free links to your site and some very interesting ways to create powerful links that I already wrote about. Do not be lazy to do this as content means nothing without exposure.

Using nothing but those two methods I finally ranked first page, second position for Wii Finder project. Total time needed about two weeks.

Weebly review, part two

In the first weebly review you learned most basic things about weebly as a content development platform for your website investing project. I also wrote about my project called Easy Wii Finder, set-up and developed using weebly.

Weebly proved to be very successful for running a niche website. Editing and designing with weebly is very simple thanks to many templates and smart page elements. If you want more control for your website layout, use two column design element. You can drag and drop to the two column element, effectively creating various layouts. You can also use the second column for pictures (look at wii dance dance revolution page) or skyscraper ads. You can also add custom html code which you can edit by selecting the element and clicking Edit Custom Html on the menu bar.

Weebly has built in SEO techniques like marking properly the headings, allowing you to add meta keywords and description (in the settings menu, site-wide only unfortunately).

But what really makes weebly special is how it is liked by Google. My wii finder site now gets around 200 search engine visitors daily. Remember that we are still using only free tools for developing and traffic. Having learned to evaluate niche keywords and how good keywords beat marketing I created another Wii related site called Wii In Stock. Will keep you updated on the developments.

I've received lot of questions about weebly so I'll try to give some answers.

How to add a domain at weebly?
You can easilly add a new site (sub-domain) in the site manager by choosing "Create A Site". If you want to add a custom domain for a site hosted at weebly, here is what to do:

1. Login to your Domain Registrar account (ie. GoDaddy, Register.com, etc)

2. Navigate to the Advanced DNS Management page

3. Option A: Setup an A Record
- Point the root of the domain to Weebly's IP address: "72.52.67.60"

Option B: Setup a CNAME Record
- Set the host name (alias) to "www" and set the destination (points to value) to www.weebly.com

Note that it can take up to 48 hours (although usually less) for these changes to take effect. You'll know your domain is ready once it directs you to the Weebly site.

4. In the Weebly Editor, click to the "settings" tab, and then "choose site address". Enter your custom domain (ex. "www.example.com") in Option C.

5. Republish your site

How to use Weebly and AdSense?
You cna now run adsense on weebly through an iframe widget. Read more about it in Running adsense through an iframe widget.

How to use Weebly and AdBrite?
Technically weebly supports AdBrite through a design element. You have the option to type in your ID and ZoneID that you get from AdBrite (look in the URL for id and zs). But I could not get this to work no matter what I did. I reported the problem to weebly via feedback option, and got no response until now. For monetization of weebly site it is still better to use affiliates directly.

Choosing the Right Domain Name - Ignore common words

Usually your keywords will contain short words like "the", "for", "a", "to". You will usually be tempted to use your entire keyword phrase in your domain/subdomain name. But search engines actually ignore the short common word all together.

If you search for 'guitars for sale' on Google we will see that guitarssale.com is better ranked then guitarsforsale.com. By looking at the way Google analyzes search results, we can see that guitarssale.com has better keyword density then guitars for sale. Notice how Google highlights in bold the keywords in domain name and whole guitarssale.com is in bold, while in guitarsforsale.com only guitars and sale are in bold, the middle part is skipped all together.

So next time you register a domain name keep it short, without common words ;)

I haven't actually confirmed it, it just struck me now.

Check out the second domain name trick and find about netvestor projects.

Google Page Creator Review

For easy development of my new project I have chosen the Google Page Creator and here is a review.

Signing in is easy if you already have a gmail account, just use it and you are away. You will be automatically get your first site as yourusername.googlepages.com. First thing to notice is that you get to have three sites in total (at the time of writing this), instead of five as written in description. This is probably because people were grabbing subdomain names like crazy. If you read about this trick when picking subdomain names you should not have problems.

This online page builder follows usual Google philosophy to keep everything as simple as possible. You start by picking up a theme and layout. This is the first problem as the design of the site will be somewhat limited because themes can not be altered.

You can then add pages to your site and easily interlink them together (when making a link you can choose between external or your page from a list).

Adding page elements like images is easy, as it is aligning their position. You can also edit html directly and add javascript, flash or any other objects. This also means that adding adsense will be easy as copying the code into html where you want it. There is also a number of predefined gadgets to use, like weather forecasts, news, games etc. but many of them come with some kind of advertisements so their usability is questionable.

Now comes the bad part. You have absolutely no control about website settings. If you wondered how to delete a website with google page creator (it would not be a problem if you didn't have a limit of three) then wonder no more, as you can't! If you accidentally delete the home page you can not undelete it or create it again! If you copy the page because you have a similar one, the name of the page will not be possible to edit and it will just get a suffix '2'. The name of any page is not possible to edit at all, and they get names by the title you assign them to them at creation. The user also has no control about displaying and formatting the site title.

On the bright side, the tool is relatively easy to use and you have total 100 MB allowed space to upload your files. Also sites built this way should be indexed by google very fast without you doing anything. That is the reason I am not posting a link to them at this time as I want to measure how much time will pass before they appear in the index.

I expect that google will soon update the page creator with some new features so stay tuned!

Proper use of dashes in domain name explained

Often when developing your new site on one of the platforms I wrote about (weebly review, squidoo review, tumblr review...) you have a choice to pick up a subdomain name. So if your niche is laptopskins your site will be something like laptopskins.tumblr.com.

Obviously you want your keywords in your subdomain name. That helps with SEO and brings you higher in search results. But sometimes it is hard for a search engine to split your keywords if they are written all together. Although google says they can split your words pretty good, you are still not sure. Adding dashes (or hyphens) will sometimes be necessary to help out the search engine with your words. However, dashes lengthen your website address and also make it harder for users to remember. So you want to use dashes only if you really have to. How can you tell?

To find out if you need dashes in your subdomain name or not go to google and type your keywords (allconnectedtogether). If you get a "Did you mean?" hint from google with your words split up, you are safe to use it without dashes. Otherwise dashes might be necessary.

Why is website investing better then domain investing

Here is a hint. Imagine domain name as a piece of land. If you grabbed a really good piece of land before the area gets developed, chances are you will be able to sell it for a much larger profit. Same goes for domain names. To make really good money you need to pick domains early and with a hint of an idea what is going to happen. Unfortunately people buy all kind of crappy domain names (land near dumps) because the opportunities are almost all gone. They hope to sell them one day but it just will not happen.

Domain trading sites are full of all kind of domain names that just lie there doing nothing. Occasionally you sell a domain or two and if you are really good you can actually make some profit. For most people domain name trading is like stock trading - you might get lucky but you will eventually loose.

But let me give you an idea what you can do about it. Why let your land just stand next to a dump and do nothing about it? Develop it into a website! People make profit with buying and selling land, but they get really rich (Donald Trump style) by investing in real-estate. Same is with domain names. Secret is to develop it into a mini site, about anything really, learn the necessary marketing techniques and start earning. With relatively little effort you can make a site that will earn you about $10 a month. That will pay for your domain and earn you an extra $110 per year. You can then chose to sell it as a site for 10x or 100x as much as a domain name was worth. Or you can turn your entire portfolio into a money making machine.

Review of Weebly as free website development platform

I have already presented tumblr and squidoo in my previous posts (cool laptop skins project and wii finder). I also reviewed weebly, free website creation service (all services I will be talking about are free). Since I was getting good SEO results from weebly I decided to make a full review.

After signing up you will find yourself in weebly website builder. Basic element of a weebly website is a page. You can choose page layout from many templates that weebly offer. However most of the templates have very similar layout with just slightly different graphics. Two main layouts are navigation menu on the side and the other one on the top. This does not allow for much creativity but it is enough for our niche site needs. The interface is easy and intuitive to use and you should not have any problems creating a site with couple of pages around your main niche.

Google analytics are also easy to add to weebly, you can paste the code in the footer area of site settings.

However there are some cons. First weebly will not allow you to edit html code directly. Second weebly has no support for javascript. That means no fancy effects, gadgets and other javascript goodies. That also means you will not be able to use Adsense directly on your weebly site (update: it's possible now read more here) which is of much greater concern. You can use AdBrite which is natively integrated into weebly.

All in all, use weebly for simple sites, that you do not want to spend a lot of time with. Do not rely on ads, instead use affiliate programs to monetize your site.

Here is a very simply weebly site to get an idea - Wii Finder

Netvestor Project - Wii Availability

This is second project I have undertaken. I have chosen to use a different development platforms this time in form of squidoo and weebly.

The targeted keyword was "wii availability". It had good very good basis, low competition and high search frequency. Also the potential to sell was good with Nintendo Wii being very popular.

My Nintendo site is called Wii Availability and is based on Squidoo developing platform. I have included ebay and amazon modules that you get by default on squidoo which is very handy. Squidoo gives you percent of every sale. Also squidoo automatically shows adsense ads and gives you percent of revenue of those as well.

However after some time using it, I learned that squidoo is a bad development platform. It is convenient for making mini niche sites, which a lot of people misused to create spam. Garbage. Thrash. Google realized that and heavily penalized squidoo rankings. This means that it will take a lot of effort for your squidoo page to show up in google search. Which makes it practically impossible to use.

Squidoo pages have also very unnatural, spammy look. You will have trouble finding a really usable squidoo page. That is why I do not recommend it. This mini review of squidoo indeed meant to be this harsh - that is how much I didn't like it.

I have created another test site on weebly, called Wii Finder. It's purpose was to act as a sister site for the main site and also to learn about weebly as a platform. I have to say I am pleasantly surprised as weebly seems to offer a lot of tools for building a site. It also integrates very easily with google analytics.

Although I had run similar campaign to my laptop skins project, the results are very bad. I only have around 1 visitor every two days. I think this is because nobody really likes squidoo. Out of 15 visitors so far I did not have any income. Lesson learned.

Interestingly, weebly site gets about 14 visits a day all by itself although all marketing that I did was towards the squidoo site. Way to go weebly!

Netvestor Project - Cool Laptop Skins

This was my first project. I have skipped phase one (see Earning money using Internet and zero investment) and decided to create content on something I like. This happened to be laptop skins. Writing about something you like is usually good idea, but it becomes a great idea when that topic does not have a lot of competition (not many sites write about it). In my case there was a lot of competition and although I have created relatively informative content, I have to fight many strong and established sites and that is why do not have good ranking in search engines. This ultimately results in fewer visitors which at the end means less sales.

Cool laptop skins was created on tumblr. Tumblr is primarily a blogging platform. It is extremely easy to use, produces great looking pages and is liked by the google as my site has appeared in google index in less then 24 hours. But it is also very basic and besides creating simple posts you will not be able to do much more. I can recommend tumblr when you need to display multimedia content like pictures and videos because they look very nice on tumblr templates.

To promote it I used couple social bookmarking sites but most traffic came from reddit and ezinearticles.

I have average of around 7 users per day. Original name of the site was Laptop Skins. But I have changed it since to Cool Laptop Skins. Choosing a narrower niche (more keywords describing it) ultimately brought more visitors from google. This is because there a lot more sites that deal with "Laptop Skins" then sites that write about "Cool Laptop Skins". This makes my site rank better for that phrase. It is also true that there are fewer people that are looking for "cool laptop skins" then for "laptop skins" so you need evaluate the balance. That is very important.

Since I do not have any of laptop skins to sell I have found an affiliate partner. I did a search on google for "laptop skins +affiliate" and found a company that sells laptop skins and has an affiliate program. They gave me a share (10%) of every sale they made that came through my site. In about 20 days I had income of $5 (two products were sold). That makes it about 70 visitors per sale which is very good. But majority of traffic came from referring sites like reddit and ezinearticles which is not a very good things. What you want is a high position in google for your search term so that visitors can come every day directly from a search engine. This is called 'organic' traffic. To rank good in search engine you need to do a lot of things and there is a whole science about it called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But you do not need to know all that, you just have to rely on rational thinking and few extra tips that I am going to write about in next few posts.

Earning money with zero investments using Website Investing methods

How to make money with zero investment? It is an old question. Thanks to Internet, making money opportunities are in abundance.

I want to share my experience in how to earn money on Internet using only free tools and services through a process called Website investing. I will show you methods and techniques that I learned. And we will learn together in this netvesting adventure.

The whole Website investing process can be split simply into fours separate steps:

1. Research
2. Development
3. Marketing
4. Conversion

Research is a part where you search for a 'niche' for your new Website. Niche is a term, made of one or several keywords, describing your target market. Like for example "shoe making". Your want to find a niche for which you have little or no competition on the Internet, while there exists a general interest for it (people search for it in the google). Finding a good niche is extremely important.

Development is a part where you develop your website around your niche. We need a development platform and content. Good content is very important because you want users to read about something useful which will help you get better rankings with search engines like Google and Yahoo. You will develop content using free website creator services, such for example is blogpsot.com the home of this site. I have not paid a cent to have this site, I do not pay any bills and I do not have to worry about server problems. I only have to write. Everything else is taken care of. There are a lot of other sites like this all about you will learn in website development related posts.

Marketing is a phase where you let the world know about your content. Purpose of this step is to generate traffic (visitors) to your site. The more usable and original content you have the less you will have to worry about marketing. Still you have to make an initial move. Social networking is very popular tool for letting others know about your content. There are other tools like forums, directories, word of mouth etc. The crucial thing is to have content worth talking about or recommending. Key to remember is if you wouldn't recommend your new site to your friends , then don't expect others will.

Conversion is where all the visitors "convert" to earnings. It is all called monetization. It is somewhat a rough word, but it describes process from a monetization perspective. In practice about 200 visitors are needed to make one sale. Interestingly it does not matter what you are selling. If you are selling a sticker for $2 or a diamond ring for $2000, it will still need about 200 visitors to sell it. Chance is people that look for stickers will have around $2 to spare and people looking for diamonds will have $2000. That's an interesting fact that needs to be remembered.