Blog Explosion & Adsense

You may wonder what exactly is traffic exchange programs. Blogexplosion is one of the popular traffic exchange programs. Now, I’m not saying Blogexplosion is bad service. Instead, it helps in getting traffics to your website. However, if you’re putting Adsense on your site it may not be suitable to use such service.

Recently in April 12, Mike Deeringer from the AdSense Publisher Support had stressed the importance of this point.

As many of you already know, our program policies strictly prohibit any means of artificially generating ad impressions or clicks, including third-party services such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, auto-surf, and click-exchange programs. These programs offer incentives for users to view web pages or click on ads, resulting in activity that is harmful to our advertisers.

We occasionally receive questions from publishers interested in using traffic exchanges to bring traffic to their site. While these services may help advertise your site, we don’t recommend using them, as they may also result in similar invalid activity.We realize that you may have questions about a specific traffic service and whether it could potentially create invalid impressions or clicks. However, please understand that we’re unable to comment on any particular third-party service.

According to Mike, it didn’t really say which third-party service you shouldn’t use but it is stated implicitly that all type of traffic exchange programs will end up being banned from the big G.

To avoid being banned, think twice before joining any traffic exchange programs.so as far as possible try to stay away from auto-surf programs or traffic exchange programs.

Directory Submitter

One proven way to get traffic to your sites is to get them listed in authoritative directories. Directories are just websites that list and categorize other websites. That's how Yahoo! got its start — it was a big web directory to begin with. There are two benefits to being listed in directories:

you get found by humans browsing for sites on specific topics; and
you get extra search engine juice from the directory links.

The problem is that getting listed in directories is a tedious process. First, you have to find the directories in question. Second, you have to create an account for the directory. Third, you have to submit the details about your site. And you have to track it all. That's why products like Directory Submitter get written, to do away with some (but not all) of the drudgery.

Directory Submitter comes in two editions: Standard and Gold. The Standard edition is completely free and lets you submit sites to 350 different directories. The Gold edition costs $47 (which is cheap compared to Brad's other products) and lets you submit to over 1700 directories. All directories currently listed in either edition are free directories that do not require reciprocal links, which is a big plus. And the directory list is current and maintained by Brad Callen's staff.

Although I've upgraded to the Gold edition, this review is going to use screenshots from the Basic edition.

Blogging Tips

Muhammad Saleem has written on Copyblogger about writing specifically to get some traffic from Digg. Often called Digg bait, the articles sometimes are not the best written, but it is well known that they have to be formulated in a certain way to appeal to the Digg audience.

Writing for Digg is actually less about substance and more about how you present the content—in other words, copywriting. This entails writing the same content that you would normally write, but altering it in a way that doesn’t take away from its essence while making it appealing to the broader Digg audience. This is the kind of content that both your regular readers and potential new readers will appreciate.

Muhammad Saleem is very right in saying that writing for Digg can be a bit like crack (an addictive substance) because the waves of traffic are amazing. The traffic though isn’t the best type though, as they avoid advertisements and rarely comment on the actual article.

Definitely worth a read if you are interested in Digg traffic. There are many posts on Copyblogger where you can find some copy writing tips for Digg and other social media sites.

Adsense - Tips & Trick Part 2

Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.
When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.
If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:
Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site.
Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.
It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions
If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:
Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.
Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages
This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.
Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric,
Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.
We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again.
We appreciate your patience.
Sincerely,
The Google Team

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.

Tip #4: Check your keyword density
Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here: http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
This lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler.

Increase Google Page Rank (PR)

Google Page Rank (PR) is a numerical value determined by the importance of the page for Google. Pages are ranked from 0 to 10, where 0 is unknown, and 10 is very important (very few resources, such as Microsoft, Google itself and others, have such rank). The higher your rank is, the higher your page is in Google Search results. The exact algorithm of ranking pages is a secret, but there are some major factors influencing it.The main thing Google crawler relies on while ranking a page is the number and the importance of the inbound links (links to the page from other pages). It's like other pages are voting for you. The higher rank linking page has, the higher its influence on your page rank. So, if your page rank is 3, to increase it to 4 you need either a group of links from 2-3-4 ranked sites, or a couple of links from 7-8 sites.It's also important that influence of a link depends on the quantity of links at the connecting page. So if a page links to you and 3 more pages, its vote is divided to 4, or its influence is 4 times lower than it could be if it only linked to your page.

There are some simple mathematical researches on how PR calculated; you can check webworkshop.net, for example. But usually there's no need for counting links and their importance - for a start-up it's better to act, and for resources with high PR it's impossible to count all the linking pages. The case when counting link's influence can be very helpful is buying links from other pages.If you need your page to be ranked high for an exact keyword or phrase, its better that linking sites will mark you the same way. Like if you'd like to get to the top of Google on "how to cook", you need other pages to link to you as "how to cook" resource.So, increasing your PR means getting a lot of back links, that can be done in following behavior:
1. Submitting to directories.
2. Writing quality content that will make people link to you.
3. Participating in forums (the link can be added in your signature).
4. Exchanging links.
5. Buying links.
6. Spamming.

Spamming is usually putting links to your page in comments section in blogs or in forums. To avoid spamming a webmaster can add "nofollow" tag to HTML code, so the link will still appear on the site, but won't influence linked page PR.Spamming is also a way to decrease a page PR. You simply need to put a lot of comments, with links to spam sites and so on, to a page. This is how some of this blog pages went down in Google - I didn't moderate comments for a long period of time, and, as a effect, got about 100 comments on some of the posts. I suggest you to allow comment moderation at your blog and delete spam comments at once.There are not only inbound links influencing your PR, some other factors, like age of the page, updating frequency, etc, can be important.

There's a couple of nice posts about that at dailyblogtips.com.You should also keep in mind that PR update (it's when Google checks your page rank for the next time) takes place about once in 3 months, so you better make everything necessary before submitting your page to Google to get high PR straight away.