Make Money from Blogs » Paid

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 21 – How to select the right SEO consultant

ashish — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:20:27 +0000

By now, you would have learnt that Search Engine Optimization is one of the most critical items to ensure that your site / blog is popular, and there are a number of techniques and optimizations that you can do to increase the page ranking of your site (as well as some of the items you should avoid). However, many of you would have also learnt that it is not easy to do all this, with the techniques that are relevant getting modified over a period of time (and some of them turning negative over a period – as an example, earlier it made sense to pack your site with keywords, but doing so now can get your site penalized by Google and other search engines). Hence, it is fairly easy to rely on professionals to do this for you, and this is where SEO consultants come in – these are people or companies that promise to ensure that your site can do wonders in terms of increase in search engine rankings and in turn, some of them can be fairly expensive. However, hiring SEO consultants can do wonders for your site, subject to certain conditions and checks:
- Before you start hiring a consultant, do some research on your own, in terms of where your website ranks as opposed to your competitors
- Determine the keywords you want to rank for, find out where your website stands in terms of ranking for such keywords, and where your competitor stands for. Explore alternative keywords that are less sought after, but are still good enough to draw traffic
- Do a search for various companies and individuals who are involved in the business of SEO consultancy, including reading about their success stories and projects that they have worked on
- Talk to the company or individual and find out about their success stories, including whether they have managed to get their own SEO site listed in top ranks of Google. If they quote sites as as part of their success stories, then check for the ranking of those sites
- Ask the experts for the steps and processes they will take to promote your site, and find out whether they will be following White Hat strategies, or dubious strategies. Be very wary of experts who promise to bring your site to the front page results within a matter of weeks
- If a consultant or company claims that they will submit to thousands of directories and link farms, find out more. Many link farms are not rated well by search engines, and you can suffer if you are listed by such search engines
- Evaluate the performance of the consultant, and set out goals. Also talk to multiple consultants in terms of defining a possible time based strategy and result matrix before selecting one of them

Paid Hosting: Shared vs. dedicated servers

ashish — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:37:04 +0000

A majority of the people who go in for setting up their own hosting accounts go in for shared hosting, where there are a large number of people sharing the same server (typically on a Linux machine). Shared / virtual hosting packages are the default web hosting accounts for beginners and intermediate web site owners and make the most sense as well. Shared hosting means that the server on which the web hosting account resides is shared by many (typically hundreds) customers. Such a hosting method is the most popular and most economical.
What are the advantages of a shared web hosting experience vs. getting a dedicated server? You get a trouble free administration of the hosting experience (the server) since the web hoster takes care of the administration (including keeping it up, checking for software patches, etc); the profile of most users who go in for shared web hosting is such that they would not prefer to get into any kind of detail about these administration duties. Power users however often require greater control over the system, such as “shell access” which allows them to perform command line operations or to install specific software (besides ordinary – php, perl, etc. – “scripts”, which usually shared customers can install, too).
Power users will often prefer setting up a Software Virtual Server or even a Dedicated (physically real) Server, in both cases with root access to configure, remove and install whatever they want.
How do shared hosting users get to install different applications, and so on ? Well, almost all shared web hosting plans come with a specific web hosting control panel. The type of control panel offered by the hosting provider is often an important feature for intermediate web site owners since they are often used to “their” control panel (i.e. CPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin…); and they provide a convenient interface to install a variety of blogging apps, forums, shopping carts, Content Management Systems, Statistics and Reports, etc.

Types of web sites suited for shared / virtual web hosting:

Almost all web sites are suited to be run on shared web hosting accounts, with a few exceptions:

- Chat server applications: These usually consume too much server resources and require a dedicated server unless the chat is barely active.
- Wildly popular forums: These also usually require too much server resources at a certain size (i.e. hundreds of users online simultaneously).
- Other very active web sites if they are very dynamic. Dynamic sites are sites that are served live from a database on each request, opposed to “static” web sites which can serve much more visitors on the same server resources (CPU time and RAM memory) than a dynamic web site.

Some top rated web hosting providers:

Globat
vistaPages
MidPhase
BlueHost
HostExcellence
IX Web Hosting
HostMonster
HostPapa

Adsense payment information

ashish — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:51:13 +0000

So you have signed up for an Adsense account, and have got your address verified from the Google Adsense program, and Google can now give you money for your ads. You must be eagerly awaiting your first income from the Google Adsense program, but are not clear as to what you must do in order to receive the money, as well as what format you get the money in. Further, the time period which the Adsense program considers for calculating the amount of money due, and the monthly (or some other period) payment cycle is something that you should read a bit more about.
Well, Google explains these issues very well, both on the Adsense account page, as well as on the Help.

Once you Log in, click on the ‘My Account’ tab, and you will be able to find more information relevant to you.

With regard to the help pages, these links should provide a lot of help:
Payment Guide page Help link. . From this page -
5 Steps to getting paid
1. Check your address
2. Provide your tax information
3. Select your form of payment
4. Enter your PIN and phone verification number
5. Generate $100 in earnings

The page also explains how to track your earnings, as well as how to calculate as to when you will get your payment.
Payment arrives: The time it takes for your payment to arrive depends on form of payment you have selected.
- Standard delivery checks: generally arrive within 1-2 weeks of the mailing date in the U.S.; outside of the U.S. typically arrive in 2-3 weeks.
- Secure Delivery checks: generally arrive in 5-7 days.
- EFT payments: should arrive in your bank account within 2-4 days.
- Western Union Quick Cash payments: available for pick-up at a local agent the following day

You can also Hold your payments. You may not want to receive payments only when you have made $100, or do not need money right now, or are shifting your address and do not desire to receive the payment during the inbetween period. You can do that after logging in to your Adsense account -> My Account -> Account Settings -> Payment Holding

Having paid links on your Blog – don’t !

ashish — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 07:45:49 +0000

As your blog becomes more popular and you start to get an increasing number of people visiting your site, the temptation to have paid ads on your site must be tempting ! For most people who have Adsense, getting some more Ads for which they are paid for just hosting the ad (as long as they are getting a number of users coming to their web page) is welcome additional revenue. However, in my opinion (and after reading a lot of external comments), my advice is not to either try to get additional traffic for your site by paying people for putting a link to your site, or to put links to other sites that are paid links. Google does not like it, and is fairly aggressive in responding to it.
Here are some comments from Google help on this issue (link1, link2):

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:
Links intended to manipulate PageRank
Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag

Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.

There are many programs that promote selling of text link ads / banner ads on sites, and can lead to a major problem for you if you fall afoul of Google.

Here are some additional links that discuss this issue:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/11/30/official-google-penalizing-paid-links

http://ma.tt/2007/10/google-penalizing-paid-links/

http://searchengineland.com/071007-173841.php

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?Google-Penalizes-Paid-Link-Farms&id=716032

Free hosting vs. paid hosting

ashish — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:34:08 +0000

Consider this; you are just starting to create your own website, a place to host your own content, the place of your dreams. You have thought through all that you want to create, and are ready to go. However, now you are stuck with the logistics of where to create your own website. You would really not want to spend a large amount of money, while at the same having a good hosting experience and a set of tools that will help you easily host your content.
You have a choice now; you could either use a free web hosting experience, or you could go in for a paid site. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Advantages of free hosting:
1. It’s free; this literally needs no explanation
2. Helps when you are new to the web and would like to experiment with the medium
3. The hosting companies provide easy tools to upload content onto the site

Disadvantages of free hosting:
1. Many of these free hosting companies make money through ad banners – so when somebody comes to your site, they will see ads and popups
2. The revenue from these ads goes to the hosting company, and not to you
3. For many of these free hosting companies, you may get a domain name that is actually a sub-domain, that has the name of the hosting company as part of the name
4. The space provided may seem large initially, but this is actually limited space
5. If you are looking to appear professional, then it is better to host your own domain
6. Paid hosting gives you access to many different softwares such as blogging software, Content Management Software, Forums, Emails, Database Access, Shopping Carts, and so on
7. You get much better support if you are using paid hosting
8. Search engine rankings can be sometimes poorer if you are using free hosting
9. You may get limitations in terms of restriction on bandwidth – so if your site becomes very popular, visitors may find themselves unable to access the site

A) For a list of free hosting, refer to this list:
A listing
Netfirms
Bravenet
Mister.net
Tripod
Free Web Hosting Area
Geocities

B) A list of recommended paid hosts:
Globat
vistaPages
MidPhase
BlueHost
HostExcellence
IX Web Hosting
HostMonster
HostPapa