Above is a little picture I wanted to show you.

For those among you who are used to looking at website traffic graphics you see that something strange has happened here…

You see, the picture above is from one of my websites and shows clearly what the impact was of the following story.

I made a mistake, a simple one but with large consequences as you can see.
Because of this mistake traffic for this site almost went done to zero.
But if it had gone down to zero it would have been clear what happed right from the start, but it did not, I “just” lost traffic from the mayor three search engines.

What happened?

In simple terms: the site was hacked via  a remote inclusion attack from several forum like websites, one of them was successful.
There was just one file affected but one of the most important ones, the .htaccess file.
There were four lines of code injected at the bottom to the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]three - code used

The code in line three redirects those search engine robots too the site in line four (which I changed, the real site got enough traffic from me).

How was this possible? Simple, because I forgot to reset the security on .htaccess after doing some previous test.
The file was still set to 707 = also public write access, and yes its security is set back to the right access now.

How to find out your site is hacked

As I said before if the traffic had gone to zero you most probably would have checked your site and see a defacing of the site itself of some kind. The site would not work the way you would expect it to.

In this case the only problem I could see was that the traffic dropped hard in the statistics.
Upon looking further into the details I checked the ranking of previous Google search terms the site was ranking for.

I found that all the top 10 ranking pages ware gone! All my efforts to rank for those keywords were lost.

So I logged into Google webmaster to check if there was something horribly wrong with the site and the site had received some kind of penalty.

And yes there were errors with the URLs in the sitemap.xml, errors about unreachable URLs.
So I checked the files on the site that where modified just before the drop, and there was the .htaccess file with the above mentioned code.

Getting back into Google

After cleaning up the mess and setting the security right I realized the impact of these few lines.

All three search engine robots had gotten notice that the pages where permanently moved to another domain! which is not true, but they don’t know that.

Checks on site: reference in Google, Yahoo and MSN showed that the domain was still in Yahoo and MSN Indexes, but had no entry in the Google Index anymore.

So it was time to send a reconsideration request to Google telling them what happened, what had been done to resolve the problem and what steps where taken too prevent it from happening again.

After that, you can only wait and wait…, don’t expect an email form Google, just an automatically generated message in your Webmaster control center that they will look into the matter.

After a few days traffic started to build again from Google and Yahoo as well as MSN (Live.com) so you can conclude that Google really looks and acts upon your requests.

Hard Lessons learned

Now for the fun part of this episode, the lessons learned
First lesson: make sure to secure your cms installation and critical files.

Some tips:
- change passwords on a regular basis (use keepass if you have a lot off passwords to remember)
- secure your admin directory or files with .htaccess passwords, most of the hosting companies have this option in their cpanel
- update your system as soon as a new version comes out.

Check your stats once a day, or a least every few days for strange things happening, since this could have taken me a long time to get back if it wasn’t for those early warning signs.

As a personal note: I need to get more incoming links from non-search engines to diversify my traffic sources :-)

What I realized after my traffic was back to its old level was that Google is really fast in acting on 301 redirects and changes in their index.
They update their index with a higher frequency than Yahoo and Live, and they really act fast on those re-inclusion request as well.

A hack like this before your start your SEO work for organic ranking would also mean that all your efforts will have no effect… so if a cusomers is really having trouble to get his or.her site into the search engines, check the .htaccess file!

If you have your own horror stories like this one, please share them in the comments and let us learn from those stories as well.

Tags

Optimization, SEO, Search Engines

You are reading Lost and Regained Traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN the Easy Way an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

You now how to find keywords for your website, right? You know about Google external ad tool, WordTracker, trillian and seobook.

But there are more easily and very targeted keyword suggestions to be found.
The Search Engines themselves will show you what they think are the most relevant keywords…
It is like looking into their database and finding what they think is relevant for you visitors.

You just have to now how and where to look.
I did some research for a new page of a new site to check out the Singer Anastacia

Google Suggests

First Google, as this is one of the biggest engines, their you can use Google Suggests to find extra keywords.
You just type in you target keyword and you instantly get a drop-down box that shows you related search suggestions.

Yahoo homepage

You have to use the search box on the Homepage of Yahoo to get the next items to show.

here it works the same way as with Google Suggests, just type in you search word and you get a related items drop-down box.

Live.com Search

Microsoft’s Search engine Live.com also has suggestions for your keywords, but the just show up after you did the search.

In the results page you will find a nice listing on the right hand sidebar.
And they throw in some songs suggestions to take into you list..

Ask.com Suggestions

Yes, you can find the best suggestions on Ask…
They give you a complete left sidebar with all kind off suggestions, even other related items…
You can find extra words to target in the “narrow your search” items.
Find other artists to include in extra pages to build somewhat of a themed site with “Related Names”
Find extra keywords in the “Expand your Search” items.

Af course you will have your own favorite, but for my the Ask results pages was on of the best to use…
You could try the more.. link as well….

Naturally you have to combine the results from all the resources you can get to come to what you think are the best keywords to target, but that’s what makes it so nice to do Search Engine Optimization.. finding new ways to get relevant visitors to your websites!

Tags

Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engines

You are reading How Search Engines Help finding Keywords an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

I got back from a short Holiday a few days ago.

You might have the same problem I had to get started again with work and business, and getting through ton’s of E-Mail.
Not even all off them where spam.. but there where some nice ones that made it OK.

One of the Things I did on my vacation was to read a book.. yes I do sometimes, especially if you have NO Internet connection on you holiday address.

But was it relaxing, yes and no, the reading first was somewhat hard to get into the subject, but once the basics were done, the good stuff showed up.
And now I have to work on the subjects and insights I gained… so should you!

It was an eye opener and pleasing to read as well, this book will definitely by my site if I am going to evaluate my sites and that of my customers.

But there where also some chapters that luckily confirmed my ideas and give not only insight in how to make a site more usable for the visitors, but also for search engine spiders!.

What book? Well of course the book that does make you think!

Tags

Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Search Engine, Webdesign

You are reading Holiday Thinking and Optimization an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Oke, you know what SEO means, and what Joomla is.. but this LSI?

Well, if you really are into Search Engine Optimization, you have come across this term “Latent Semantic Indexing” or in short LSI.

So, is this going to be such a long an technical post about algorithms and how they are build… no, its not..

But what you should know about LSI is simpel, it is all about related keywords!
Yes the ones you are so desperately seeking to improve your visitors numbers, but it goes beyond what you normally do.

To explain the term in a more down to earth manner, you should know that you are using it the whole day through en you didn’t even realize it.
Say for example you are thinking of Joomla, what comes to mind? Components, Templates, Modules, Plugins, Content etc, all of these terms are related to the Content Management System Joomla.

Another example, you walk into an unknown supermarkt and want to buy a bottle of Coca-Cola, what do you do?
You look for a sign in the hallways marked “Soft Drinks” because you know it is related to your search.
But you don’t have to think about it, you just know.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Google and other search engines use an algorithm that does something similar, it looks at the structure and words used on a website to determine the basic topic, on main subject of a website.

But is uses this related terms also in their personalized search results!
Lets look at the results a musician will get, someone who searches for Music, MP3, Records and sheet music and song lyrics in Google.
If he/she would now uses the search term “mambo”, the results will point him to websites about the Dance “Mambo”.

If I would use the same term “mambo” the results are highly focused on the Content Management System “Mambo” and there will be results about Joomla sites as well..
But that is because the main part of my searches are all about Internet and Content Management Systems.
You see these are all highly related results for both persons.

How does Joomla Help with LSI

 One thing that the search engines look for to identify the subject and relevance of your website for your Keywords is the way your website is build , or structured around the topic.

Now this is where Joomla has its strength, although some may hate it, and that is its structure for content.
You can have one, or more sections, but each section is build with categories that holds the content pages.

And to name and sort these categories, you look for, and use the structure that you see fit for your topic!
So for a Joomla Information website, you have categories about Components, Templates, Modules, Plugins and sometimes extend into Joomla SEO :-)
You see that the categorie structure forces you to think about your subject and use the most related and relevant words?

So in this case the so called weakness of Joomla becomes one of its strengths.
And yes I know, WordPress is great for Search Engine Optimization, but the use of Categories only becomes useful if your tightly restrict the use to just some categories.

Drupal is also great for Websites and Blogs, but you still have to come to grips with this Taxonomy thing..
And If you don’t get it, how are you going to explain it to your customers?

Joomla is a great Content Management System, that has its pros and cons, but I really think it is one of the best for a Small or Medium Business website to start out with and has te potential to grow with the Company.
And because of the rigid structure it will help you to keep your content and structure in focus, and thus relevant for Search Engines as well as your websites visitors!

If you liked the content of this article, please subscribe to the feed to keep up-to-date.
One word of warning though… I am off to a two weeks vacation, so you won’t see any update for that time.

But after that, I hope you will read some nice Search Optimization things I have thought up during that time, happy holidays!

P.s. One way to find these words, is to go to the Google Keyword Tool and use the Site-Related keywords tab and fill in the nr One website in your Niche.. you will find some great related terms you did not think off before.

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, SEO Articles, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading How Joomla helps with LSI and SEO an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Last time I wrote about the Title use in Joomla, pointing you to the Joomla Page Title, and the use of the Alias for schort URLs.

I all so pointed you to the Paid SEF Patch that has the HTML Title rewrite in it, and more options then just that.

Now there is a new Plugin, the JooFox Content Title Plugin  which gives you a great way to use the Title Alias to improve your HTML Titles…

How does it work?
Just install the Plugin, go to a Joomla content page, and change the alias to get a better title.

You can read more about the way it works and some extra things to think about before using this Plugin on my blog post at getting-the-number-one-seo-factor-improved-in-joomla 

You can greatly improve your Joomla SEO with the combination of the Free SEF Patch from Joomlatwork and this new Joomla Content Page Title Plugin!

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading Joomla Title Plugin for Search Engine Optimization Improvement an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you run a Joomla or WordPress Based website, you are of course constantly creating quality content for your users.
Writing the best Titles like www.copyblogger.com told you how to do.

But there are several options in Joomla, and with the right Plugin you get something similar in WordPress.

If you create new content in Joomla, you find yourself with two Title options:

The Title and the Title Alias.

The first option is what is going to be the title of you page and is show as a content header.
The second option is not shown anywhere on the page.. so what’s the use of this option?

Most SEF Components have the possibility to use this alias as the base for there URL rewrite.
So you can have an Title that says:
“The best Content Management System, Joomla or WordPress”
but the alias is written ”Joomla or WordPress CMS”
With the use of the alias, you URL is going to be http://www.example.com/joomla-or-wordpress-cms.html
instead of the longer title based version

http://www.example.com/The-best-Content-Management-System-Joomla-or-WordPress

But with the paid version of Joomla SEF Patch by www.joomlatwork.com you get a second title option:

The HTML Title

Now this title is the one that gets indexed by Google and other Search Engines… this is (after good content) the number one Search Engine Optimization tool.

With a standard Joomla installation, you content title is also the HTML title.
But you might want to keep the content titles short, and the HTML titles extended with some extra keywords…!!

This functionality is also integrated in the latest version of JoomSEF, in the edit URL section.

The Title Options in WordPress

You may not be aware of it yet, but there are similar functions in WordPress.
Just start writing you post, and you are editing your Post Title, which (if you have permalinks enabled) becomes the content of your URL as well.

But there is this nice option in WordPress that is called “Post Slug”

Here is where you can change the URL that is used for you Post, especially useful if you have a long post title..
Just shorten you Post slug and the URL will be much shorter and easier to pickup.

And with the right Plugin you also have the possibility to change your HTML Title, or as some call it, you SEO Title.
There are two Plugins that can do that for you:
The SEO Title Tag Plugin which is great for rewriting titles in bulk, and for page titles rewrites, and the best part is, you can use it in combination with the next Plugin.

This Plugin not only gives you the HTML title rewrite option, but also the best way to insert Metatags like keywords, and with the use of the “Optional Excerpt” to fill the MetaTag description.
This Plugin is really the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress and this one is a must have for Search Engine Optimization.

It does even more than just the Title rewrite as you can see.
It can even fill your Metatag Description automatically with the first words from your post…

If you want to use it with the SEO Title Tag Plugin, just untick the Rewrite Titles and the Titles from your other Plugin are used.
So if you are starting a WordPress Blog, go for this Plugin form the start and you will do allright.

Title use Conclusion

The HTML Title tag is very important for your Search Engine Optimization.
Not only should it be written to draw people to your website, it also should contain your targeted keywords.

With the options I mentioned above, you have now the possibilities to extend the power of the HTML Title tag beyond your post title and keeping your URL short as well.

Make good use of it, and don’t forget to write some keywords, but even more important, write very good excerpts of you post and content in you description tags.
Because in essence they are small adverts for you page that show up in the SERP Pages of the mayor Search Engines.
So work extra hard to create those descriptions.

Tags

Blogging, Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEF, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine, WordPress

You are reading What Title to Use in Joomla or WordPress an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Just a few day’s ago you could have read about Google and Placement Performance..

Now is time to expand the Google network with the Pay-Per-Action on a Global scale.

So I just wanted to show you some of the links to the Information Google is giving out on this “new” advertising model.

Here is the basic most important line from the Pay-Per-Action FAQ:

How much does pay-per-action advertising cost?
“Only you can decide how much you want to pay for your pay-per-action advertising. You determine how much you’re willing to offer for each specific action to be completed on your site, whether it’s $5 for a purchase or $1 for a newsletter sign-up. You can also control your spending by setting a daily budget.”

For mor Information on the subject you can check out:

Google AdWords Pay-Per-Actions ads
Pay-Per-Action FAQs
Google Announced Beta Test
Google Going Global with PPA

The advertisers that might be part of the Beta will receive an Alert in the AdWords account.

Adsense Publishers and SEO

But how about the Publishers I wonder? has anyone seen something of the Publishers site of this action?
I guess this will be by invitation only..

Looking at the factors that are off importance for the AdWords Advertisers:
“Starting today, advertisers who use AdWords conversion tracking and receive more than 500 conversions from their cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) campaigns in the most recent 30-day period will be invited to join this beta test, on a rolling basis.”

You can imagine that there will be only Adsense Publishers invited to check out the PPA programs offers that give good quality content on their website that makes it possible to get those high performance conversions..

So if you want to get into this game and earn some more money with  Adsense and PPA, you have to make sure your website is in Tip-Top shape with high quality content and of course you need to work on your Search Engine Optimization, otherwise you lose…
So does Google indeed want you to be part of this? I guess So with their recent Policy Update

Tags

Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading Google goes Global with Pay-Per-Action in AdWords an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Google has Launched the Google Adwords Placement Platform, making it easier for Advertisers to see what sites preform well in their campings.

So now its becoming a lot easier for Advertisers to track conversions and also to find sites that are engaged in Clickfraud I Guess.

But a while back you could have read the post on Google becoming the Ultimate Affiliate and that is where this Placement Platform is going to be the Next Step…

Now you are able to track conversions of your Adwords campaigns, and its just a small step to take before your can track conversions of the affiliate programs that you push to those Adsense Publishers.
What a network… bringing win-win situations all over the place.

You can target the best performing websites, Google makes a lot more money because they get more commissions fees and hopefully the Publishers will have there piece of the Pie too.

Read on other the different idea’s of working with this new tool at The Thinkseer Blog and on SEOBook

Tags

Affiliates, Optimization, SEO, Search Engine

You are reading Google AdWords Placement Platform the Next Step into CPA an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

I like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Typo3, all Open Source Content Management Systems.
But which ones are Search Engine Friendly? Or are they Search Engine Optimized?

To be honest, Joomla in the latest version 1.0.12 is not Search Engine Friendly, the new Beta 1.5 version is much more Friendly from a Search Engine Point of view.
For the current version you have a lot of work to do before its Friendly enough.
Drupal and Typo3 are already more SEF, and WordPress is the easiest to work with if it comes to creating and using a Search Engine Friendly system.

So Joomla is the worst at the moment, but I love it because its so easy to work with from a content creation point of view.
Besides that, there are a lot of free components, modules and Plugins that can help you in making it SEF.

Search Engine Friendly and Search Engine Optimized 

Did you notice, I never said any of them being Search Engine Optimized…
That is because I totally agree with Joost van der Valk in his post on Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

Also the post that inspired him by Joe Dolson is a great read on the topic of SEO versus SEF, which in turn was written as a reply to a post by Stony de Gruyter.

Then Gary of Phoenixrealm wrote a Post on Content Management Systems and SEF and SEO to point to the make sure that your CMS of choice should be Search Engine Friendly.

But just a Search Engine Friendly Content Management System doesn´t mean its Optimized!
Some Buro´s think just making your site SEF is enough to make it Optimized… no way..
As Joost pointed out, Optimization takes a lot more effort then just making a website completely search engine friendly.
Optimization is in the details, in the little things and learning from tracking and evaluating your changes and there effects.

Search Engine Optimization is delicate work and you need a lot of knowledge to get the job done.
Its also not a static one-time effort, it takes a lot more than just that to get good ranking and stay on top with your results.
So why waste the SEO´s time to make a site Friendly?

Educate the designers and Site builders

Just make sure that your site builders and designers have a basic knowledge about Search Engine Optimization to get the best results if your have to hire an Professional Search Engine Optimizer!

The basics are not that difficult to learn, like the comment op the post of Joost by Ruben Timmerman mentioning that a web developer should know that the title tag of each page should be into the H1 tag.
It should be basic knownledge of your designer on how to work these things into there designs.

There are companies out on the web promoting there SEO Services who don’t have a clue what SEO really is.
I have seen some websites from “Search Engine Optimization” firms that are so NOT optimized that I would never give them that part of business..

But the main thing is, looking at those content management systems that they all use templates.
Templates designed by Professional designers, who have no clue about Search Engine Optimization.

So its not just the developer that needs to be educated, please focus on the designers as well!
They are the ones that can make the efforts of your Optimizer much easier, by already creating Templates that need little to no work the make the site Search Engine Friendly.

Not only for Joomla, Drupal and Typo3 websites, but also for WordPress, as there are some Themes that need to be worked at to make them Search Engine Optimized…
And as Joost pointed out, those are just the simple mistakes that need to be corrected to make you website Optimized for Search Engines.

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEF, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine, Webdesign, WordPress

You are reading Is your website Search Engine Friendly or already Search Engine Optimized? an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

I was reading an article by Wil Reynolds on The Thinkseer Blog about the Question Do you attract early adopters 

According to the recent research of Hitwise Wil Reynolds mentioned Gmail traffic has increased by 17 % since its no longer an “By Invitation only” service, but free for all.
Initial thoughts occur from this research, stating that in the US Gmail is used by Early Adopters that this is a new way to focus on those Early Adopters.

In his post Mr Reynolds makes a good point on stating that people who use RSS Feeds to keep up-to-date also are in the Early Adopter section and that RSS feeds could be a good way to target them in you marketing strategie.

Gmail and Feedburner

How nice to see…. Google and Feedburner..
If you use Feedburner you of course have set the Smartfeed Option to make sure you users can subscribe to your feed more easily than using an xml file..
(Feedburner – Feed – Optimize – Smartfeed)

But one thing most Feed publishers don’t use (yet) is the ability to have Feedburner bring your Feed updates to email users.
(Feedburner – Feed - Publicize – Email Subscriptions) (Tip !!)
At the moment you as a publisher can choose between Feedburner, Feedblitz or R-Mail to handle those mail subscriptions for you.

I guess its just a matter of time before Google is going to integrate its Gmail service with a One-Click-Button to provide the updates via Gmail.
Why? Because there is just much more space for advertisements in Gmail then in a Post Feed…
Was this the real reason to buy Feedburner?

Now I love Netvibes to get my RSS feeds brought to me, does that make me an Early Adopter or just a Follower..

My call to action

It seems to some people that a Blog post must have some kind of “Call to Action”.
I normally just like to inform people about how I look at some things an write about that perspective.

Reading the post of Wil Reynolds, I do want to take a special approach to this one.
You see, I like Wil.. I did a post on a SEO video of him at the Affiliates Summit on my other Joomla SEO Blog on which he left a nice comment.
The content of the video is even better….be sure to check it..

So I thought it would be nice to return a favor…
Besides pointing Wil to The Real secret of getting Feed Subscribers
I hope you check out the Thinkseer Blog , read the informative posts and bring them up to the 100 Subscribers sooner than the end of this year :-)

For Wil a have a call to action to… Wil, this is your Feedburner subscription panel now:

Please activate the email subscription possibility from Feedburner and get into the Gmail users Early Adopters crowd with you blog… :-)

For you and everybody else, if you happened to like this Blog post, here are the Feedburner options to subscribe to this Blog with your favorite RSS reader… or receive them by email..

Tags

Blogging, Optimization, SEO, SEO BLogs, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading Early Adopters use Gmail and RSS feeds, are You an Early Adopter? an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Google required Feedburner recently, was this acquisition just another company on their way to becoming the Ultimate Super Affiliate?
You already now that RSS Feeds are the Future instead of eMails… 

Everybody who works with Adsense knows that Google already promotes their own products via a CPA model, for every Picassa or Google Pack installation and activation you get payed, not for the Clicks.

They already Bought Doubleclick and probably paid to much for the company to get the Information of Performics and its Data.

But where does this interest in those Companies come from?

In August of last year there was this report called “The Death of Adsense” and of course the Top people at Google must have read it, since they have to protect there product..

In that report one of the items is the fact that Adsense advertising revenues for publishers have dropped due to the introduction of “Smart pricing”. Which gives the AdWords user the possibility to get more Bang for their Bugs.
http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/10/one_poorly_conv.html

But a more important phenomenon was introduced “Click Flipping” in which you, as an Affiliate would buy adverts on Google, targeting the keywords for the products your marketing and sending people the buy through your affiliate link, sometimes passing them through your websites, or directly tho the sales page of the product manufacturer.
Well, you get the principal idea behind it.

Let say you buy ads with you keywords at 0.05 dollar, 1 in 1000 (ads costs 50.00 Dollar) will buy the product that sells for 250.00 Dollar.
The affiliate pays you 125,00 dollar, profit will be 75.00 Dollars…
(All numbers are fictitious of course).

Google and Affiliates 

The Top Guys at Google now understand all of a sudden that they are leaving money on the table!
They get 50.00 Dollars where they could have gotten 125.00 Dollars..hmmm..

So the Thoughts comes to mind…
What do we need to get into this Affiliate Business?

First we need to have products to promote, so should we buy Clickbank?
No, that would be to obvious, lets buy DoubleClick! Then we get the advantage of the knowledge to handle all the aspects of Affiliates.

And the Payments for these products? We don’t want that done by a separate company like paypal… no, we can use Google Checkout for that. The Product is there already.

So, we got the products site covered, and the payments handled, what’s next..ah, the promoters of your products, a key part in the process…

Adsense Publishers

Wait, we already have a large base of people selling for us.. the Adsense Publishers!!
Yes, but they are only used to get there ads delivered to them, not actively promote them.
 So..?  We need to educate them and convince them of the benefits of promoting these products!

We could use that to introduce them to CPA by giving them small products to promote, like say Picassa or Google Pack.
Lets call it “Referrals” and we encourage them to Promote these products.

Now we have to optimize the Process to get the most out of it for the best results and the highest return.

First thing to do is to make sure the Landing pages of the Products are as good as they might get, so lets start this initiative by working on the AdWords landing pages, should be a nice testing ground.
And in the process the products suppliers learn how to make the best conversions pages as well

After that, we will give the publishers some nice incentives to get working on this Referral thing some more to make sure they are well conditioned if we go live..

Can we do some things to be able to target the prospects group even better?
Yes, we can manipulate… ehh, sorry, Personify the search results to fit the users profile even better and then bring better targeted offers! (Ps. a good explanation of these Personalized Search effects can be read at Thinkseer )

So, we are ready to send out some personal invitations to the CPA program.
Of course we first send out invitations to the “Google Adsense CPA Beta” to high profile entrepreneurs to see what is possible.

So, I thinks we are ready to get going with this CPA stuff…

And people are just thinking the Google is just the Term for referring to Googol as the amount of data we want to index :-)
But its actually the kind of money we want to make….

Ahh, Just as long as we don’t do Evil..

Well, just a little bit then, lets take out some of the competition first by cleaning out the Arbitrage Publishers from our Adsense accounts…

And then Promote using Adsense for Affliates…

But what does this mean for the current affiliate products suppliers like Clickbank?
They will certainly get a big competitor to tackle with!

Is this a Good Development?

I don’t know, for the product suppliers, probably yes, for the middleman like Clickbank, definitely NO.

For the Adsense Publishing Webmaster it will mean a new way of earning money on their site, if they are willing to go that extra mile of referrals.

The biggest advantage lies with the AdWords Publishers, they get an extra opportunity to promote their products through a large base of publishers.
Based on a the possibility just o pay Google for the action, not the Clicks.
Which in return gives Google the opportunity to diversify and giving an alternatief for Adword users that are afraid of Click Fraud.

Tags

Affiliates, Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading Is Google Ready to Become the Ultimate Super Affiliate? an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

I wrote some articles lately on using a Cache Component for your Joomla based website.

Now why do you want to use caching if you are Optimizing your website for Search Engines?

The thing is that most Content Management Systems are using a database, mostly MySql, to hold their content.
To display this content there is a “simple” process that creates the page in you web browser that takes you Template file, selects the content that is requested by the browser from the Database and gives it altogether to browser to display it to you visitor.

This process is called “parsing” that is done by your web server of choice, for the most hosting providers this will be Apache, some will use IIS from Microsoft.
Content Management System will be based on PHP, ASP or other more proprietary systems.

But what all of these systems have in common is it that your web-page is generated “On the Fly”, that is when it is requested…

A Search Engine Robots view

Have you ever watched your statistics to look at how much time a search engine spider spend on your website?
Please do, you will be surprised at the time it spends. The come and go on my websites under a second !

I wrote some time ago about How Your hosting provider helps you with SEO and talked about the standard cache functions of Joomla.

Having a Cached version of your Webpages helps search engine spiders to fetch that already made page and read it faster then if it still has to be created.
Now that is logical, right? Yes it is!

So caching is a function you should use if its available for your Content Management System.

Lately there is a new component for Joomla that is working much better than the standard, at least for Not Logged in users. I don’t now any Search Engine Spiders that Login to a web-page (Unless its the depot of the Home-base where it must Unload its content :-))

You can read more about the features and installation at “How to boost you Joomla performance”

Drawbacks of Caching

It’s not all Golden if you start using caching.
Depending on the caching system of choice you might have a system that uses files or one that uses Cache tables.
But in all cases you need to set the caching time.

Caching Time means the time, in seconds, that the generated page is staying in the cache before it is removed.
You need to clean out your cache sometimes, other wise new page content stays in the database and will not be shown…
This time should reflect the update time of the content of your website, so a news site hast to have a shorter “time to live” for your caching system than a semi static website.

You also need to have extra space on you server to hold the cached files, sometimes this can be more than expected, especially for large websites with lots of content.
But hey, these are the ones that will gain the most of this system, since it will free up resources from there web server CPU time to work more efficiently.

So its a small price to pay, then space is not an issue anymore for most hosting providers.

For some systems Caching is still under development like finding the right system for Drupal is not that easy.
For Joomla your best choice is the default completed with either the Components of Joomlatwork (Commercial) or IrcMaxell
(Free)
If you use WordPress, like this Blog, you could use the WP-Cache Plugin.

Just a word of advice, Clean your cache after writing or changing the content of your website ! 

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO Optimization

You are reading Getting into Speed with your Website an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

I know, its off topic :-(

But many of you are probably Blogging with WordPress, and Hopefully with Joomla as well.
And I found two major WordPress Plugins that in my opinion ar just “Must Haves” for your Blog Search Engine Optimization.

All in One SEO Pack

This new Plugin is a replacement of “Another Metatag WordPress Plugin” but has some real nice features.

First it gives you the ability to have your titels like “Postname – Blogname” without having to change your Template setting.
Second The Categories you assign your post to are made into tag for your Metatag Keywords.
The Description Metatag is taken from your Excerpt, it can even create one for you from the post itself, although I don’t recommend this, you really should make the effort of writing your own.

The Categorie pages are set to “noindex,follow” to prevent duplicate content.

Another nice thing is that you have the option to Set the Metatags Description and Keywords of your Homepage a well…
Other options are to use the Categories for Keywords Metatags, and set extra keywords per post, You can also choose if you want the Titles to be changed by All-in-One-SEO-Pack (Download Link), or have them handled separately.
This last option works best for my, since I also have the other Plugin I wanted to tell you about.

The SEO Title Tag Plugin

This one is a real killer… if you have read the SEOmoz Search Ranking Factors you know that having you keywords in the Title Tag is a number one Item.

But you don’t want to have long Post Slugs for your Permalinks, nor do you want Long Titles for your posts page.
This SEO Title Tag Plugin  gives you the option of rewriting the Post Titles, as well as the Page titles you might have.
Installation is really easy if you follow the simple instructions on the homepage of the Plugin.

One thing you should be aware off, is that the management of the Titles are not at the options page of the Plugin, but on the really obvious place “Manage”, there is a extra function “SEO Title Tag” from which you can choose to manage your page titles or you post titles (in bulk)

Having these two Plugins combined gives you full power and control over some great Search Engine Optimization for your WordPress Blog

So make sure you have them active, write your Titles the right one, use your tags and write great excerpts..

But most off all, write good copy for your visitors…
I hope this one works for you, although is not about Joomla :-)  

Tags

Optimization, SEO, SEO BLogs, SEO Optimization, Search Engine, WordPress

You are reading Two Must Have WordPress SEO Plugins an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

This might sound strange to people who use the standard Joomla Feed, or work with WordPress, since these Feeds are automaticly found by IE7 and Firefox and some other browsers like Opera..

But the main problem with the standard Joomla RSS Syndication Feed is that it strips all HTML code and only the Frontpage Items are put into the Feed.

So you want to use a Feed component like DS Sycndicate from www.joomlafun.com and give the Feed to your visitors via FeedBurner to make sure it works properly.

But there is one problem with this solution…
There is no Feed line in you index.php..

Here is the solution for this problem:

copy the line  < link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/JoomlaSeoBlogByPathos-seocom” > to a text editor and replace the Title and Feed URL with your own.

Then you place the corrected line between the < head >  and  < /head > section of your template index.php file. (Via Joomla’s Template Manager)

Save the file and Clean any content caches if you have Cache activated.

Now visit your site with IE7 and look if your RSS feed shows up!!

More info? Check Microsoft Team RSS Blog !

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Search Engine

You are reading How to Put a Live feed into your website an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Yes !! They finally got it !!

In my post of November last year I asked that the search engines “Make it a standard crawl !! Instruct your robots to look for a file called sitemap.xml the way they look for robots.txt.”

Well, now they are going to do it…. in a even better way as well..

You can read about the announcement on The Ask Blog Sitemaps Autodiscovery they will tell you more on the Search Engine Strategies in New York.

It is going to be simple addition to your robots.txt file like:

SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

You need to put in the full URL, like for this site is is going to be

SITEMAP: http://herbertvandinther.com/sitemap.xml

Put your sitemap.xml link in your Robot.txt file now!
If you have mutliple sitemap.xml files, you have to put the paths into a sitemap index file and point to that file.

If you don’t want to wait on the Autodiscovery, You can still send them:

To Google via the Webmaster Central,
To Yahoo as a feed in their Site Explorer,
To ask via the command:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

To Live? I guess just via your Robots.txt file…

Update: Read more on Sitemap and URL Submission

Tags

Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engines

You are reading Sitemap.xml and autodiscovery by Google, Ask, Yahoo and Live via Robots.txt an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Carsten Cumbrowski wrote an interesting article on Remapping URLs with data from some recent studies on the subject by real life websites.

Read the article and see why a Good SEF Component for your Joomla based website is "must have!"

And with the majority of these components the old URLs are picked up and redirected to the right page without any effort on your site.

Think about it…. changing your Joomla website to get better rankings without loosing the old links, doesn’t that sound like a win-win situation!

You already know my favorite to do this sh404SEF

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, SEO BLogs, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading The Real Reason not to be afraid for URL rewriting on an existing site an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

As You might be working on your customers new website, checking the Coding and Colours to fit, you sometimes need some fast update for your knowledge.

You knew there was some code to do that special kind of thing that would work great on the new website.
But what was this again? something like.. or.. no, that’s not it..

What I like to do at those moments, late at night, working on this nice problem, is to get a Glass of Jack Daniels.

And now? Now you have to love Jack Daniels even more …

Please check out this great help he is providing on Cheating with the “Jack Daniels Cheat Sheets“.

And If you are not intressted in coding, you should.., check  online-marketing-for-beginners

P.s. Keep the sheets close at hand, you will need them soon..

Tags

Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

You are reading Do You like to Cheat and Love Jack Daniels? an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you are working on Search Engine Optimization like me, you probably have made the same mistakes.

I had Forgotten the Three Files that you have to be aware of if you want to do a good job on SEO.

You know be now the standard SEO stuff, Keywords, Headings URLs and so on..

But do you look at the following files as well:

404 Error Page

If you rebuild a website, or change the structure of the URLs there are most certainly going to be same Search Index results that link to now non-existing pages.
Make sure to keep those visitors by making a good Error page offering them another way into your website to find the resource the are looking for.
This may cause some problems with Joomla!, but at least try to have a 404 Error-page up.

.htaccess

Sure, you need this one to make sure it works for URL rewrites, but use it also for defining you Error-document 404 page.
And of course redirect the old Search Engine hits to the new pages.
This is best done by a 301 redirect which is both friendly for your visitors as well as for Search Engines.
It is not an easy file to work with, but read and take benefit of this .htaccess file

Robots.txt

In this robots.txt file you allow or disallow search engine robots to index certain directory’s or files of your website.
If you want you images to show up in the Search Engine Image searches, you better make sure they can be accessed.
For Joomla! this means taking out the rule ‘Disallow: /images/’

Using these three files in the right way, and your visitors, and the Search Engines, will have a better experience on your Search Engine Optimized website.

Tags

Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading The 3 most forgotten files in SEO an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

No, I don’t mean the music of an Opera, although I sometimes like to listen to one or two…, no, I mean The Browser!

Do you use Opera to check your website, how it looks and responds to another browser?
Cool right? And fast to, but there is more to Opera than you see at first Glance.It’s a Great tool for Checking your Search Engine Optimization.

And its now Free as well, back in the “old”days you had to pay for it, but that’s long past.
Download Opera if you don’t already got it and try some of the nice features I will describe here for you.First check the author part dropdown list of what you can do when checking your website.

Check it in a text browser form, it will strip away all eye-candy and exposes what a search engine spider sees.

Check your site for Accesiblity, to make sure everyone can read the site, or have it read by a program!

And there is much more, try all these nice options and see wat works for you and your website.
O yes, where to get it!

Just follow the picture on the right……
Or just go to www.opera.com
Have Fun and Learn

Tags

Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Webdesign

You are reading Why I love Opera an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If your think you rank well in Google, think again..

Google’s Geo-targeting and your Position

Working on Search Engine Optimization, you have to think about the people who are searching for a specifiek term and how you can be found.

But what if you are trying to reach an audience form an other country?
Let say you want people from Europe to find your Camper Rental site in the US.
Just when your SEO Company or Consultant has brought you to the top of http://www.google.com/ you find your visitors only come from the USA Region.

What is happening?

The reason for this is because Google, and other Search Engines, use a system called Geo-Targeting.
In short, they look at you IP address range and focus the content of the Search Engine Results Page on your networking environment
Thus providing you with results close to your area. 

That is why you sometimes get a different result when running the same query form your home and from your work place.
If that happens, aks your network administrator if your connection to the Internet is running via a provider in an other country.

How to Check the Foreign results

First thing you can try is to change your preferences in Google and set it to a different language for the results.

Or try out the functions on http://oy-oy.eu/google/world/ , now the site may look like an Adsense scraper site, but it really isn’t!
There are really nice functions on checking your website and information on several aspect of your website.

One other site to look at, to see the results from Yahoo side of things, might be http://www.pagebull.com/ which show you the search results as click able screen shots, and you can select a country to search from. Really nice with suprising results.  

How to overcome this problem

Actually, the best thing to do is to create a new website with an extension focused on that region.
For instance use a .eu domain next to your .com website
Also choose a provider for that website in the region you want to target.

If you are from Europe and want to target the USA, pick a USA Based provider….
I know, I didn’t, but I just created Design-cars.com as an SEO study object (O Boy, did that turn out as a large knowledge enviroment..:-))

One other thing thats is easier to do, is to check with the above mentioned tool who you are competing with and learn from their sites…

Yes, doing the analysis again and do the Optimization again… its an on going effort.

If you know of other options to solve this problem, please share the knowledge by commenting!

Tags

Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engines

You are reading You think you rank well in Google? an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther