Is My Website Still Indexed In Google?

'How can I find out if my website is indexed in google?' is a question that frequently pops up in the newbie forums

The simple answer is this.

• Paste your website's URL in the Google search bar. If it is indexed, it will come up with the title tag of your page and the description metatag. If more than one page is indexed then it will provide a list of indexed pages with the format as described above.
• An alternative is to type in site:yourdomainname. Again this brings up a list of indexed pages with the titles and metatags

If the message returned is says your site is not found it could be one of two things.

• New website: The site is really new and has not been crawled by the google bots yet. The solution is to try and get links to your site from authority sites or frequently crawled sites
• Banned site: Some irregularities have occurred in relation to your site and google has banned the site. These irregularities could be bad links, keyword stuffing etc. If you are aware that you are doing anything against the TOS then you really should delete whatever it is and try reapplying to Google for re indexing. Usually not successful and other marketers have reported having to start from scratch to get their content back into Google. I suppose the lesson is stick within the TOS

Online auction sites: ebay alternatives

Ebay is an amazing online auctions site. And a few people who have recently asked me where they can auction off there stuff have got ebay as the standard answer from me

But I got thinking there must be other options, surely
And there are.

The one that looks most promising to me is Triple clicks

Still doing some research on it but has a solid reputation and haven't found any glitches...yet

Click here to check it out

Oh and the listing is free, but you knew that already

RSS Feeds, Quick comment

Just a quick comment on one of the responses I got on the last two posts. A fellow blogger and a friend went the extra mile and put a button for millionrss on his blog. The idea is peopel who visit his blog will bookmark his feed and therefore increase his feeds prominence at the RSS feeds directory. Kinda like social bookmarking.

I think this is great, but as a marketer you need to be selective about which social bookmarking sites you want to achieve prominence in. Then spend time building relationships at those sites.

It really does take time to build enough followers or friends to significantly impact your links..

So what am I saying?

Great idea Andrew, as long as you limit the number of bookmarking sites you want to work with or perhaps outsource things

Some RSS Diectories Bloggers Must Consider

As a follow on to the previous post on RSS directories and niche blogs, here is a list of four feed directories that I suggest you submit your blog's RSS feeds to. Obviously as you gain more experience with using feeds, you will also discover other feeds directories that you think have good results.

RSS Feeds

RSS Mountain
One of the largest feed directories. Has over a million feeds. Submission is free but requires an email address

Feedbees
A relatively new RSS directory that launched early last year and now has over 200000 feeds. Feed submission is free and they use Adsense for RSS. This means any clicks on adsense ads in your feed generates revenue for you.

Millionrss
Almost 200000 feeds A free feed directory that is easy to use. needs an email address and some details

Feedfury
Only has about 35,000 feeds but seems to have a wide reach especially in the US





Myblog2U is a newer directory. It requires a reciprocal link for your link to be accepted but this may be an advantage as it helps weed out a lot of the dross



So what next?

Get the RSS feed of your blog and get submitting

Till next time

RSS feed Directories And Niche Blogs

So if you are using the blogger platform for your blogs you will notice an icon at the bottom of your page that says 'posts atom'. This is the URL of the RSS feed for your site. An RSS feed is simply a very simple format of your site that can be displayed on other peoples site. It is a website snippet so if someone posts the url of your RSS feed on their website then it displays some of your content on the site

Is this a good thing. You Betcha!

RSS feeds are a great way to get visitors to your site. Often the feed displays only a snippet of your content i.e the first few words or paragraph of a post.

Lets paint you a picture. Adam goes to site x a feed aggregation site that just manages to rank high in the search engines. On that site he sees an interesting first paragraph of a post on your blog. He sees this because site x has subscribed to your RSS feed. He finds this opening paragraph intriguing and clicks the read more tab. This takes him to your blog, which if well written will hold for him a lot of interesting and useful content that brings him back again and again

It would be an easy world if all you had to do was post useful content to your blog and the big sites scurry to your site and excitedly subscribe to your feeds.

The sad truth is in a world with millions of blogs and a lot of these with good content, you actually will need to be a little proactive about getting your feeds out there.

I am talking about feed directories. You need to submit your feeds to as many RSS directories as possible. It is slow and tedious but it really is well worth it.

In the next post, I will give you a list of feed directories that you can get started with

If You Must Buy Website Traffic

In the last post we talked about why buying traffic to your sites is not such a great idea. And highlighted the loopholes in buying traffic

But are there are reliable, ethical sources of traffic that can be bought. If you must buy traffic what are the options open to you?

Pay per Click: Absolutely definitely hundred percent legitimate. And you will never get penalized for this. With a well worded PPC campaign, you can start getting traffic to your site withing 15 minutes of setting it up. Obviously you pay for every single visitor that gets to your site via your PPC ad and they may not convert. PPC can also quickly become rather expensive so before doing any PPC I advice you get some training. Now there are several PPC services out there but the two major players are Google AdWords and Yahoo search marketing. I think investing some money in learning about AdWords is money well spent. I use this free course when I decided to go into PPC. Gave me the basics which gave me a good platform to build on.

Ezine Adverts: Not sure that advertising in ezines converts as well as it did a couple of years ago, but if you want to get your advert in front of people interested in a particular niche, then advertising in a popular ezine in that niche would be one way to go about things

Personally I think that free traffic via the search engines is the ultimate source of visitors that convert. Obviously It takes time to build your search engine ranking to the level where you get a significant number of visitors consistently but the bottom line is SEO should be one of your key skills as an affiliate marketer.

I guess I am supposed to recommend an SEO guide here

This article, On Page Search Engine optimization, should get you started

Till next time

Buying Traffic, Is It A Good Idea?

The more traffic your site gets the higher your chances of making a sale. Or at least so we are expected to believe
And in a bid to increase website traffic it is really tempting to buy traffic

We have all seen the ads. £30 for 10000 visitors to your site or something along those lines. And some reading this post may have actually gone ahead and bought the 'traffic'

The long and short of it is these kind of traffic brokers usually do not deliver high quality targeted traffic to your sites. Let us take a closer look at some points

Traffic conversion. What proportion of this bought traffic actually ends up taking a desired action ie clicking on an affiliate link and making a purchase, or clicking on an adsense ad, or joining your opt in list. From reports from other webmasters that have bought traffic, conversions are just about nil. So what is the point of paying money for a ton of 'traffic' that does not make you any money?

Traffic source. where do these 10,00 visitors come from. Think about it. If you had a list of 10, 000 people that are interested in a certain product or niche, and they are real people, and they are ready to visit a site and take action. well would you be selling this traffic for 30 bucks. I think not. You would probably run out, set up your own website and send the traffic to it. And retire a rich happy man :) But more seriously, you have to think very carefully about the source of the traffic. there are paid to surf sites where people are paid to visit sites. And there is even software to automate surfing. i really do not think this kind of traffic is going to convert

So on the issue of buying traffic from the mass click brokers, I think the answer to the question asked in the title of this post is no. It is simply throwing away your money

But having said that there are other forms of bought traffic that do convert and are real visitors and we will be covering these in a later post

Till next time

Livejournal Job Cuts?

Wow.
I could not believe it when I heard the news
Live Journal is a major blogging platform and I am sure that some followers of Niche Traffic have live journal blogs of their own.

I must say that I am surprised at the news of the job cuts. As always the usual 'restructuring' phrase is given but one wonders if the credit crunch and global recession is not a contributing factor.

Hmmm and what is that about moving to Moscow?

Difficult times ahead for anyone with only one source of income, the job

Till next time

Is Twitter Useful For Niche Affiliate Marketing

So I gave in and finally took a look at Twitter. Twitter is what is known as a miniblog, i.e a blogging platform that permits you a limited number of characters per post. In the case of Twitter the limit is 140 characters

For whatever reason twitter seems rather popular especially with online marketers

So my question when I joined was does this really help?

I am a great believer in testing things out for myself so I duly signed up and did all the research necessary to improve my chances of succeeding with twitter

The results so far?

• Followers. I have managed to get a few followers i.e other people subscribed to my Tweets. I really honestly cannot tell you how they found my twitter account or why. But as long as their interest is maintained, I suppose that's the point of things really. By the way just to mention that I did nothing to advertise my twitter profile. Just set it up and added updates
• Updates. Really difficult to get a point across in a few words I find and some days I put tweets that even I would not be interested in. I think one really has to think carefully about the updates and get you main theme across within the first 4 or 5 words.

• Update Daily. Like blogging, Twitter seems to thrive on frequent posters. As my post frequency increased, the number of followers increased.

• Backlinks. I think Twitter is not really useful if you want to use it to get backlinks to your sites. Once the URL posted is longer than 30 characters, then it uses a tiny URL link. I am still trying to see how to get around this. Found a few methods which I will describe in a later post once I have tested them, but so far nothing that would create any excitement

So for me the jury is still out. I honestly believe that for marketing Twitter is just another social networking tool. The advantages are making more contacts and a platform on which you can build relationships and maybe build your online reputation. But as for any direct and immediate traffic benefits for your site, I don't think Twitter has anything special to offer

Obviously I am still testing things out and if things change as I gain experience, I'll let you know.

Till next time

Google Alert, A niche Marketers Tool

Google alerts is a service provided by google where you enter a word or phrase and google alerts you via email every time that keyword is used and tells you on what website it has occurred

Google alerts has several uses for the niche marketer

• Keyword research. If you want to know how frequently a word is searched or used on the Internet, just set up an alert for it

• Researching your site: Website traffic analysis gives you a pretty good idea of how frequently your site is visited. But does not tell you how often your website is referred to. e.g someone makes a mention of your site on their blog using a no follow link. Alerts can let you know whenever your website is cited as it happens. Useful for assessing who your supporters are and more important for putting out any fires. If you know what I mean :)

• Finding blogs to comment on. Now blog commenting is really useful for building reputation on line and also for getting links back to your sites. The aim is to comment on blog posts as early as possible. With google alerts, you can set a blog alert up that tells you as it happens when your chosen keyword is used on a blog

The problem with google alerts though is if the word or phrase you set your alert for is popular, then obviously your inbox will be swamped with alerts

I suggest you set up a different email account dedicated to your google alerts campaigns

Also if you set up an alert for a multi word phrase, then you could get alerts for the individual words as well

The website is http://www.google.com/alerts

Till next time

Social Bookmarking Sites And Niche Marketing

Social bookmarking sites are yet another tool in the armamentarium of niche marketers to try to increase traffic to the money making niche sites

And for most newbie affiliate marketers, that stampede of traffic that is supposed to occur once the sites are bookmarked just does not happen

But social bookmarking sites do work. We just have to learn the rules of the game and then ...Result

So here are a few social bookmarking tips that I have picked up from the many ebooks and videos I have watched on the subject

• Mass submissions: To be generally avoided. In the past it as great to submit to as many social bookmarking sites as possible. Simply for the backlink value. But now the majority of them have no follow links. I know, you have seen the forum posts that have this wonderful list of social bookmarking sites that do follow. Well try submitting your bookmark to them and use SEO elite to try and analyze the bookmarked webpage's backlinks. Need I say more. So select just a handful of social bookmarking sites that you want to work with and stick to them, at least till you get the results you want

• Bookmark other people's sites: If all your bookmarks point to the same set of websites, then things begin to look a litttle fishy. Bookmark other people's sites as well as your own. It helps build relationships fast and could garner you some bookmarks in return. I suggest bookmarking sites that are not in direct competition with yours :)

• Build relationships: This is the reason why you want to work with just a few bookmarking sites rather than the whole horde. You need to build relationships at the bookmarking sites, make friends, increase your profile, that sort of thing. It takes spending time in these sites to build a large enough group of friends to make a significant ifference to your bookmarking results. [By the way, this is what I am working on at the moment] You must have heard of the concept of the power digger at digg. He posts an article and it's like magic. Within a few hours he gets double figure or triple figure diggs for his post. It takes time and a lot of networking to attain this status

So knowing all this what am I going to do?

It's straight forward really, build relationships

Using the old methods I have managed to get one digg per post on this blog. And you guessed it, that digg is mine. Occasionally you will find a post on this blog with two diggs, those days are like christmas

With following the methods in this post, perhaps I can improve on this

Heads Up! Auctionads Irregularity

Auctionads, now known as shopping ads is an ad revenue site that I have been using to generate an income from a couple of my sites

And I noticed that just recently the pay outs had completely gone

What gives!

Earlier today, I logged into my account and for some reason thought I would check my settings i.e email, paypal email etc

And what do I find?

Some strange paypal address, email address and contact details in Selangor. Which I found out is in Malasia

I cannot tell you what is going on

Most likely someone has hacked into my auctionads account and changed the payment details

You know the old trick

I do all the work and they get all the money

I fired off an email to the shoppingads support team.

I am yet to get an answer but hey it's saturday and I have only been waiting 6 hours

Lesson: Check your contact details and payment details of all your affiliate marketing accounts

Hackers are really fine tuning their skills

A slightly frustrated

Internal Links And Search Engine Optimization

So when it comes to SEO, we are told to get as many relevant backlinks, i.e links from other peoples' sites to our sites' as possible. Preferably links with our keywords as the anchor text

But what about the internal links on our sites.

To my aplomb I found out that the internal links on your site make a huge difference to your rankings

I have a 30 page website the homepage of which has been ranking in the coveted number one position in the Google SERPs for about 40 keywords, that I am aware of, for the last two years

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I did something silly

I decided to update the site. Really Silly!!!

I changed the titles of the inner pages on the website, not really changed but altered the arrangement of the words

Problem is the original titles of the inner pages had my main keyword first and then the keyword for the subniche that the individual page was targeting second

• e.g affiliate marketing backlinks

All I did was change to subniche keyword first and then the main site keyword second.

• e.g backlinks affiliate marketing

Didn't touch the home page

All the inner pages have links to my home page

Anyway, the next crawl of my pages by the google bot came along and it's like a really dark kind of magic.

My homepage disappears from the first page of google. For all of the keywords that it previously ranked for

OMG!!!

Going from position 1 to position 60, 70 or ... Does not bear stating

It's obvious what happened here.

The internal links of my site were giving my homepage a BIG SEO BOOST for the keywords my homepage ranked for.

Because those keywords were high up on my internal pages!

By pushing the keywords further down on my inner pages as viewed by the search engine bot, SEO juice kind off ebbed

The content of the internal pages linking to your home page does really matter with regard to SEO so be warned

Till next time