One of the most important factors in getting a good position on search engines

It is doubted by no one that knows anything about search engine optimization, one of the most important factors is the actual number of web sites which have a link to yours. Which of the sites (smilies) on the left do you think has the best ranking on a search engine. Yipe, it is the yellow one because of the number of sites linking directly or indirectly to it. Of course it is not as simple as that. If you have a site on travelling in Thailand and you manage to get a link from a site dealing with drug addiction your link will not count for anything - indeed, it could even count against you. Why? It is not the link alone which is important - the site linking to you must be in the same context i.e. a forum on people thinking of going to visit Thailand. That is why webmasters are very interested in getting good "inbound links" to their sites. Alternatively you can exchange links with other websites on a similar topic. Although such an exchange "reciprocal link" does not count as much as an inbound link, it still does count.

Just a scrap of useful info on the length of title and keywords

(Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression anyone will see of your site - make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect.

A little bit more on search engine optimization - three very important html tags

Continuing with what I said yesterday, it is important to follow certain recognised rules if you want to be found on search engines like google, yahoo, etc. Never forget that for most users that is their door to your site. How else can they know you exist?

Some basics on getting your site indexed by search engines: Pleas edo nto laugh this is really basic and though who know a bit more about optimization should simply skip this.

In your browser, go to a page on your website and then on the top menu click "View" and in the dropdown menu click "Page code". What you see here is what the serach engine is looking at. Here you will find towards the top of your page three very important tags:

TITLE Social Phobia - Light At The End of The Tunnel TITLE

meta content='Help for sufferers of anxiety attacks, panic attacks and social phobia' name='description'

meta content='panic attacks, anxiety attacks, social phobia,' name='keywords'


Let us take these in turn. Title, dexription and keywords are what the search engines will read when visiting your site. If these are empty the search engine cannot recognise your sit'es content and most probably will nto index your site. So who is going to find you. Lesson No 1 for today. And we will take this optimization process one day at a time.
I am sorry that this is a google image but it has the big piece of the pie among search engines. If you are now saying to yourself, geeh, this is tricky stuff, I will get some one to do it for me, my answer is DON'T. The web is full of quacks saying they will have your website ranked on the first page of google for $49. To be honest I have worked on SEO for quite a number of years and if you were to offer me $49K I could give you no promise that your website would be ranked on the first page of google in six months. SEO you will come to see if you follow this blog is an on going activity which is never complete. There is no such things as perfection in this area.

Now in trying to show you this, this blog detected the html tags and would not let me publish so I will explain in a latter posting what you have to add.

A happy blogger here - pleased as punch with my work on traffic exchanges

Not as pleased with myself as I am with you. One of my postings got 17 comments - so I am over the moon and I want to answer some of the questions and comment on your ideas. On my posting on the bad news about traffic exchanges
Carrie
made the following comment:


If you use traffic exchange sites to find new blogs, leave comments on those blogs, yes, you might find new readers. you have to network.
search engine optimization? how does one do that? can you give some info?
I think to start with on the topic of SEO it would be a good diea if I were to focus on the question on search engine optimization and how one does that and why it is important for your site. Basically you have to make a major mind jump and know that a search engine sees your site very differently than we humans do. Ask yourself what is the most important thing I want from my website. The answer will always be VISITORS. They are the lifeblood of your site. What is the point of having information on your pages when no one visits them, simply because they cannot find your site.

If you start a new site you have just joined the other 101 million websites - estimated at Febaury 2009. So how are visitors going to find your site. Easiest answer - through search engines. Google is a monster with very specific tastes - if it likes how you handle your site it will praise you by giving you a higher visibility - If google finds you are being naughty - this I will come back to later - it gets very angry and will punish you by giving you a lower ranking. Basically the search engines are the front door to the web. Nice position to be in.

Sorry - some comments I just received

Traffic Exchanges, most ineffective advertising on the internet?

"I have tested/used traffic exchanges for over 4 years and have read suggestions, made researches etc. I have made following serious conclusions.

-WHY INEFFECTIVE?-

*Average Sign up ration: 1500 hits for 1 sign up - think about how much time you need to earn these hits. (Sometimes one user visits your site 20 times a day, exchange like Ts25.com)

*Suggested Splash pages aren't better, this isn't a miracle, like they all say.

*People are surfing several exchanges at the same time(8+). Most of these people aren't looking your site at all.

*Targeting options that they use are worthless.

*No unique real visitors. Someone who is surfing very hard can earn these credits from your site without any problems, they are just fanatic surfers(no customers), think about it.

*Traffic exchanges are too many, most of these people who use them don't see the different between "real effective" advertising and traffic exchange hits.

* Autosurf exchanges(clickevolution etc), are more fun than manual traffic exchanges, because you don't need to click(no time needed) and they bring you more visitors(traffic) and sign ups.

*Too much money schemes surfing an exchange, also too much misleading text, like FREE etc but it isn't. This misleads the traffic exchange audience.

-GIVE IT A TRY?-

*if you make a simple traffic exchange, its a way to promote. Traffic exchanges are only for traffic exchanges.

There may be more...

Thank you, and please feel free post your comments etc."

The real attraction of traffic exchanges for their owners

As I mentioned in the last post, the real goldmine of the traffic exchange owner is your email address. To surf, as I stated, on a traffic exchange, you have granted the owner permission to send you emails. Remember in my first posting I advised you to set up a separate email account for traffic exchanges on account of the number emails you will receive from them. . If you study carefully the psychology of these emails, all of them are calls to action and they can be quite forceful - in terms of the offer is time-limited. Equally many of the larger exchanges have adopted a strategy not of war but allegiance with each other. For example, you will get an offer to surf 100 sites on three exchanges in the next 24 hours and you will receive 40 free credits. Quite a clever tactic, on their part. Also I have noticed that the new traffic exchanges coming on to the net are entirely dependent on the "big boys" to advertise them. An interesting question for me is who owns these new exchanges. It is a fact that without a heavy marketing clout to the correct public (targetted), it is virtually impossible for a new exchange to get visibility.

Traffic exchanges - ultimately a question of credibility

When all is said and done, the reputation of any traffic exchange and its credibility will decide it's success. If you think about it, there are top traffic exchanges with some 125 000 members. That means the owner of such an exchange is free to email these surfers. And they all do. What is worse, most of the packages they try and sell have little pertinence for traffic exchanges. In fact, I am put off when I see they are simple clickbank products. So you can imagine if 1% converts into a sale that is 1 250 sales - let us say at $47, a time. Boy is that money.

Blogging and making money on the Internet

The average traffic exchange surfer - and here I do not intend to be cynical or rude - easily becomes addicted to being the top surfer, to getting the prize for this, that or the other and often actually loses sight of why he or she is surfing so much in the first place. By this I mean if you are surfing 12 exchanges - i.e. six today and the other six tomorrow, this I can tell you takes up a great deal of precious time - time which perhaps could be spent more properly and indeed more profitably. If like my grandmother here you are a little disillusioned with the whole traffic exchange business and it has not brought you either traffic or revenue, think of opening a blog. Why? It costs nothing more than your creativity and your persistence and if you have been seriously surfing TE's for months then you have qualified on the persistence issue. Creativity - simply ask yourself what interests you passionately? What do you know that would interest others? What would you enjoy writing about? And when you can answer these, then you can start earning money with your blog (I'll show you how).

The most popular traffic exchanges - do they make cash for you?

In a word my answer would be no. Simply ask yourself why you are surfing these exchanges for hours - that's if you are not spending money to buy credits. Some of the statistics from the top traffic exchanges I find amazing. There are surfers who will spend 12 -14 hours a day surfing traffic exchanges to gain credits - does this convert into dollars and cents? For the life of me I cannot see how. Actually if you look at the prizes TE's are giving away to top surfers, they tell their own stories. These are prizes of $5 - $10 dollars for being one of the top surfers on a particular day. This is not a way to make money if you work out what the hourly profit one makes for 12 /14 hours surfing.

The other reason I would like to own a successful traffic exchange

All traffic exchanges operate with optin registration. This means basically you have signed up not only to add your site and surf on a traffic exchange, you have also signed up to receiving emails from the owners of these exchanges. This is why I recommended in an initial posting in this blog that you open a separate email account because if you join 10 or 12 TE's you will be swamped with emails on a daily basis.

Bear in mind that the owner of a traffic exchange has one main interest in mind. You get you to surf his/her exchange and to buy credits. So one of the first things you will be inundated with are an abundance of free offers. Such offers are usually time limited to encourage purchase of credits or some other activity. One of many examples - found particularly in my experience at weekends is buy double credits for at half price. As youc can imagine if such an email goes out to all 54 000 members of a traffic exchange it will have fair conversion rates.

But the second less appetizing thing - and I have nothing against special offers - is that you will constantly receive emails selling you clickbank products on secrets of traffic exchanges, etc.

Traffic exchanges - the jury is still out!

Taking a look at the response from google when I type in traffic exchanges, I feel confused. For example, the query "traffic exchanges explained" has as number one ranking a particular traffic exchange. Strange but true. Then comes "traffic exchanges secrets" - which I read but did not discover the secrets at all. My basic view is that surfers busily spending hours surfing away to get credits could be using their time more effectively. No, you will argue, at least google will be impressed by the number of hits I am getting to my webpages. WRONG! Very, very wrong and I would even put forward the hypothesis that on the contrary google is anything but impressed! WHY? you may well ask.

Here let me add that I have spent a considerable time over the past four years in looking at how it indexes (my) pages and what counts and what does not count. But in a nutshell I would put forward the following simple statement and await your response. My statement is that today in 2009 we greatly underestimate the sophistication of google technology. May I give you a simple example and perhaps you can transpose what I say to the world of traffic exchanges? I use the example of Adsense. For those of you who do not know about Adsense it is a feature set up by google to advertise their sites on yours. You get paid on a clickthrough basis. The amount you earn depending on the price of the keywords which the advertiser has bid. [Again an explanation in a nutshell and Adsense has become a science in itself].

Google had major difficulties with this baby as it incurred a lot of clickthru fraud. By this I mean call your Aunt, cousin, whatever in Australia and ask them to click on your google ads. It worked for a while but google soon got clever. Very clever, it monitors and remembers every action of yours on the Net.

And this starts with monitoring the IP adresses from which you are getting your traffic. Hence I apply the example to traffic exchanges. You might think the traffic you get is impressing google. It isn't simply because on a Traffic Exchange your traffic is coming from a single IP. Google knows this and ignores it when ranking your site.

Why I wished I owned a traffic exchange . . . . .

Simply because the big players in the traffic exchange world - about 10 count in my reckoning make money by selling nothing - well, not exactly nothing - they do not sell a product. Ultimately they sell credits - i.e. the cash you pay for not having to click manually for hours to accrue such credits. Neat concept!

Secondly, overheads for a traffic exchange are relatively low. There are even traffic exchange scripts on the Net for nextt to nothing to build your own. As an owner your major investment is time. The ultimate goal of the TE owner is list-building. Creating a large list of people who have consented to receive emails from him/her. This is worth its weight in gold. And this is where earning really start for the owner.