Now in the beginning it did look like we had tripled our readership but honestly that was an overestimation, the truth is that its just over doubled readership.

When we posted the results after our first week the top 10 languages looked something like this:

1. en-us 3,306
2. en-gb 304
3. de 246
4. pl 169
5. cs 166
6. nl 156
7. en 144
8. fr 137
9. it 108
10. es 100

Which as you can see still has english as our primary language by a long shot – and that is still true but we are now sitting around 48% english and the rest are other languages. I’ve included a screenshot for you to see below of our analytics stats for the last month

As you can plainly see - it works! The stats have also rolled into our earnings – we’re making more on AdSense than we ever have before as it shows localised ads to those people!

LinkLauder (a service we’ve spoken about before) has release an updated statistics page which now has all of the links to your blog listed, and news that they are going to allow you to decline links very soon!

Statistics for feenikz

Registered on: 2009-01-27 19:21:03 – Userid: 405

You have 308 indexed posts from your site(s)

Links to your blog(s)

7 total backlinks.

Individual backlinks can be seen here:

1	Wanted (2008) DVDRip
2	Microsoft SQL SERVER 2005 Enterprise Edition 32 Bit & 64 Bit
3	Grow Your Business By Using A Telemarketing Firm
4	Internet y su huella ecológica
5	IBM Lotus Notes/Domino Server v8.0.1 All Platform
6	A real dilemma
7	Rob the supermarket

Nice job guys it’s looking great :)

Top pages can be described in various ways by bloggers – I’m talking about Google PageRank. These are the pages on your site people link to most, and pages you can get paid the most for.

Previously we’ve had to install a PageRank toolbar and manually crawl through what we thought would be the top 50 pages on our site – a tedious process and often you can miss pages. Enter Page SEO – possibly the best time-saving plugin available for WordPress when it comes to SEO and monetization.

Page SEO automatically (although it takes some time) goes through all the url’s on your blog (using a sitemap generated by a google sitemap plugin) and lets you know the pagerank as shown above. It’s simple to use, could make you some extra text link ad money and free :)

Get the plugin

Search engines consider links to your blog to be one of the most valuable ways of telling your authority for a certain term. If you are talking about “computer hardware” and people link to you with that phrase, or similar phrases, engines will consider you to be authoritive for that topic and send users your way when they are interested in finding out about it.

For this reason, post-sensitive back links are the very best. Let me explain, most people swap links with other bloggers and get on Blogroll’s etc – for example we might be on a blogroll as “Entropy”. Unfortunately, that has nothing to do with any of our posts and even if you do have a specific blog name it can’t possibly be specific to every single one of your posts.

Now if someone was to link to this actual post, instead of the front page, and to say “Build Backlinks to your Blog” in the link it would be very valuable! It would be even more valuable if it was from a site about the topic!

Enter LinkLaunder – a free web service for exchanging links among bloggers with a plugin for WordPress. LinkLaunder automatically puts your links onto related blogs and does it with intelligence, for example our first backlink is from a funny jokes site and its too a post of ours about funny nintendo posters; with that as the link! Perfect!

Over time as you give links you get links across the member blogs, and its all automatic. They have a stats page where you can see the links and its not javascript so it does count with the search engines!

Go sign up at Link Launder and then install the WordPress plugin. After that enter your username/password and you’ll begin to trade!

Page Rank

Page Rank is a page ranking (of course) system which was started by Google. Originally forming the majority of their ranking algorithm its since taken a more moderated part in deciding what websites show first in a search and been expanded upon greatly since the original idea – but one thing stays the same – it is a ranking from 0-10 given to a page which can be used to guage google’s opinion of the worth of that page.

The way this is built up is simple to explain. Imagine there are 3 websites called “A”, “B” and “C”. Now A links to C, and B links to C. That means A and B have “voted” for C which will mean the value of A+B are used to determine their votes, and increase the value of C.

Through some complex calculations Page Rank is formed from the number of pages linking to you, and their authority.  What that eventually leaves you with is a Page Rank which tells people the authority of your page. To have a link from a page which is PR5 is worth much more than one that has PR2. Now if I PR5 links to you, its considered a vote for your site for 5 “points” as opposed to 2 points.

Text Link Ads

This is where Text-Link-Ads comes in – a company which sells text links on websites that have high PageRank. You may think you won’t qualify for this, and you won’t be making 10,000$ a month per page if you don’t have PR10′s but from PR3 upwards they often will accept you.

You can have ten links per page of yours, and links on even a PR3 (which is easy to get) will sell for 20-30$ a link, per month.

For example, on Entropy we have over 20 pages listed with them – as you can see it can become easy to bring in thousands of dollars (or at least hundreds) a month without doing loads of impressions. There are also a lot of ways to build up your PR (directories, sharing links with friends) that don’t cost money.

Easiest Way

What you need to tell the PageRank of your pages is a PageRank checker like Quirk’s Search Status and go through your blog pages; but if you are using WordPress there is an easier way! Install the “Page SEO” plugin for your WordPress blog and let it run – it’ll give you a list of all your pages with PR.

Sign Up

Now all thats left for you to do is sign up – which is free – and start making money at Text-Link-Ads (aka InLinks).

The plugin redirects a user to a translator service at first, but over time builds up cached actual translations of your content, which show without any frames in your blog.

Within a week Google (and other engines) had indexed translations on our site and foreign language users started piling in to see our content. While the market for non-english content is smaller, its infinitely easier to get referrals as less people are posting in that language.

With 23 languages, the Global Translator took our 200 posts and turned them into 4600 posts. Give it a try, at the very least you may help someone in another language with a tip; or get a Russian comment. Make sure you let us know if it works wonders for your blog!

We’ve been experimenting across a couple of blogs lately with various AdSense strategies and these are some of the tips we’ve come accross/discovered for ourselves.

Please feel free to comment on our tips or leave your own! Let us know if you’re CTR/CPC went up!

Blacklist MFA Sites

Firstly, I’m sure you’re aware of a thing called a made-for-adsense site. These are sites which pay 1cent a click to get users through AdSense, and do nothing but advertise high paying keywords to earn more.

Having these ads on your site is useless as almost no one will click them, and if they do you’ll be paid out very little. You can manually blacklist ads that you suspect are like this, usually by blocking ads with your Competitive Ad Filter for places that give free hosting.

An example list would be starting off with blocking blogspot.com, wordpress.com, geocities.com etc. Alternatively you can have a service generate you a list such as AdsBlacklist.com

Blend

Blend your ads into your pages – make the background and the border colour the same as the post it will show in. Make your links colour the same as the links on your page. This will help keep your look and feel nice as well as get users to read the adverts, increasing CTR (click through rate).

Don’t show images next to an ad in an attempt to mask the fact that its an ad as you will get banned! Blending however is fine.

Position

Blocks have specific layout and you should not forget where you users eyes will be going when positioning ads. Included below is a the best layout for the front page or categories/archives pages on a blog

Naturally, this isn’t designed for a single post though which is where you’ll make most of your earnings! Don’t forget that! The reason for this is that users from search engines won’t often come to your front page, but to a specific post. In that post make sure you think of where their eyes will be and position your adverts within.

The most common strategy with blogs is to have a large square (300px) at the top of the post as these are the most clicked. If you engage your users and get comments also have one near the comments.

Link Units

Use link units wisely – these are typically best placed by navigation links on your blog. One click on a link unit can result in many clicks on the page that shows after that! Also remember you can have 2 link units and that doesn’t count against your 3 ad limit!

Section Targetting

You want the ads that show to be about the post you have written – not about your blogroll or your sidebar content etc. For that reason you need to use section targetting!

This means editing your theme, and inserting comments before and after your post content from Google. What that does is tell adsense to base your ads on what you have written inside the tags – focussing your adverts automatically! To learn how to do this read Googles Section Targetting page.

White Hat SEO has the same goal (longer term), but using allowed techniques, essentially, designing your site in a way that search engines will appreciate and utilize it and its content in the best possible way.

This guide will help you to easily setup and start using some basic SEO techniques on your WordPress blog.

Step 1: Download & Activate Plugins

Firstly, we need to install some plugins we’ll require. Download and install the following plugins, and we will go into more detail later on –

• All in One SEO Pack
• Get Recent Comments
• SEO Siloing
• Related Entries

Unzip them all in your plugin directories, and activate them through the Plugins page in your WordPress Admin screen.

Part 2: Utilizing your plugins

SEO Siloing
I’ll start with the SEO Siloing plugin, given that its the simplest of course. SE Siloing is essentially a “post filing” technique. It allows you to create a Page with a group of posts in a category.

For example, on my site here I have a Page called “Web“, which provides a simple listing of posts I’ve put into the category “web”.

In order to create the same effect, create Page names with the exact same name as categories (actually the category slugs) that you post in. In that page put the following code:

That will take care of the rest for you! Create as many pages as you want, but remember this is also for your users. Its essentially a quick, easy to use category system – thats search engine friendly!

All in One SEO
Actually, this is the easiest. Enable the plugin.

What this will have automatically done for you is the following:

• SEO’d titles. Post Titles are rewritten on the fly, with the actual post title coming first, then your blog name. No more ‘Archive’ in your title.
• The categories for a post get output as META keywords. Since you already tagged your posts with your categories this is fairly automatic.
• Your post excerpt gets to be the META description.
• Pages that are just fillers (category pages etc.) get a content=”noindex,follow” to avoid duplicate content.

While you may not understand any or all of this, it will help search engines to understand the content of your site.

Get Recent Comments
For this I will assume you have a theme that supports Widgets, if you don’t you can easily install the plugin from reading the documentation in the zip file.

Put “Get Recent Comments”, and “Get Recent Trackbacks” into your Side Bar, then go to the Options page to configure them. Set it to show 5 – 10 comments, a and least 100 characters. This will provide Search Engines with quick links to almost random (mostly fresh) posts on your site, with custom content written by your users. Its a great way of cross-linking.

Related Entries
Related Entries has the exact same intention and effect as the Recent Comments explanation above: its a great way of cross linking relevant information (which search engines and users love).

Install it under each post, as demonstrated here on my site by adding the code to your theme as instructed in the howto.

Part 3: Permalink structure

Permalinks are pretty (and clever) ways of showing posts in your URL bar. Instead of “http://raven.za.net/?id=4″, you can show “http://raven.za.net/search/seo-guide”. Search Engines love this, and so do users!

Go to Options, then Permalinks (/wp-admin/options-permalink.php). Choose to use a custom structure and type this in:

/%category%/%postname%

You now have sensible URL’s!

Part 4: Maintaining and building

You have now setup your WordPress blog to be sensitive to Search Engines and cross link your content. The important part now is writing good, and sensible copy.

Tip 1: Its not a newspaper! Don’t write witty headings that will mess with your URL and your search engine visibility. People won’t search for “You never would have believed…” – they’ll search for “Britney Spears has no hair”, so call you post that!

Tip 2: Categories – keep these in mind! Your SEO Siloing plugin is going to use them, and you have updated your permalink structure to have them in your URL’s – don’t make silly categories, keep them relative!

Tip 3: If you aren’t sure, don’t do it. There is nothing worse than Black Hat SEO – it does work, but only if you really know what you are doing, and not for very long. Something suspicious will get you banned!

Tip 4: Be wary the sandbox! Search engines are known to put new domains into things known as “sandboxes”. Basically, your results will show FAR FAR away for a few months after launching a new domain with a new site – don’t worry, it will come right!

Part 5: Coming soon…

Later, I’ll be talking about reporting on this – looking at search engine results to see changes, getting stats and more!

Thats right – they have 5 or so themes on the Google home page now – apparently this one can customize itself based on your weather conditions. Quite a cool idea for a web 2.0 site.