The process for a page to be indexed and returned in a visible position goes something like this. First a page must be ‘crawled’ by a search spider. What that really means is that the page is downloaded to a database where it can be analyzed. The page is then run through the analysis program to determine if it meets the criteria to be included in the index. If it passes muster it will be included in the index. The indexed pages are where the search engine looks when information is requested, so until a page is indexed there is no possibility that it will show up in the search results.

The search engines want to serve the most relevant results for each search query. They develop an algorithm to check the pages to determine the relevance to the search term. Google’s algorithm looks at over two hundred factors to check for relevance. The search engine engineers constantly tweak the algorithm to attempt to generate more relevant results. So getting to that number one slot is really very simple. Your page just has to be better than the rest in two hundred different ways!!

There are some features that I like already, and the things that are lacking are not significant. This script allows for images to be uploaded with the articles. I like images in articles as they break up the block of text and make the article more interesting. The major article directories do not allow images with the articles.

The admin interface is not as slick as WordPress, but it is functional.  The templates are available for editing as is the stylesheet. I did not find a spell checker in the article input section, but FireFox has a fairly good spell checker built in. Many authors will actually write their articles in some word processor program that does have spell checking anyway.

One thing that I am not too enthused about is the hybrid layout. There is some use of tables and some use of divs.  I would prefer a div based layout. I may look at what would be required to convert this to a completely div based layout, but I am concerned that it may be too extensive or break the script.

The script does come with one small banner from the developer, but it is not locked. It is, in fact easy to replace with any other banner or other advertising. There is one link in the footer that is required unless you pay for the privilege or removing it by buying a non-branding liscense. I don’t mind that. If the script works I will be happy to promote it.

I wrote and submitted a short article after playing with the css file for a bit. I still do not have the site exactly as I would like it, but it is loosing the family look to some extent. Remember that it is a work in progress, but if you want to check out the script do the famous click here. I have not published the link on the site, not that anybody visits there or that there is any reason to visit for that matter.

This is really just a test install. If it works out I may go live with it, but my real purpose is to investigate the possibilities that the script offers. I have two sites that need something of this sort and may adapt this for another application as well. This could end up providing user generated content on several sites. I was nearly ready to buy a script, but in my investigations it appeared that support was a problem and so I held off. I may be very glad that I did.

Please check out the new script on my site and give me your impressions. If you get there soon you may catch it before I make more changes. Try submitting an article or something while you are there.

There is a new version of the script that has just been released. There is not an updater with the new version. You must reinstall the script on your space. The installation is fairly quick and painless aside from needing to reenter a few things that should have been picked up from the existing installation. I do think that the new script will probably be more reliable.

The earlier problem was probably bandwidth related. The developer of the script had originally set the script up to pull the articles off of his server. Very little was stored on the user’s server. This meant that his server was providing bandwidth for every article that was served. The new script stores copies of the articles on the user’s server. The developer will have the initial hit of serving the files all at once for each install of the script, but then his bandwidth usage should stabilize at a much lower level.

This is a very slick piece of work. The carrot held out to induce you to host his script is that you will have a site with a great deal of content. He provides three locations for you to place banners or text ads. He also has an affiliate program in whiich he allows you to participate. There are a couple of things that he neglects to mention in his sales letter, though.

There are three text links at the top of his nav column. One of the three ends up being an affiliate link. From the wording of the text this is probably the least likely of the three to be followed, but there is a chance. The next section of the nav column has about twenty of his affiliate links as does the footer section of the page. Then there is the category list for the article directory. Following that is a gaudy banner that does report your affiliate link and  finally the space for your tower or wide tower ad unit. You do get one prime ad space at the top of the article list.

The coding of the page, both html and css is not the best. I did not check the new css file but the original took a good deal of adjustment to get things to display properly. My css file works fine with the new script, so I wonder if the current css file is any better than the original. The html uses empty divs for spacing and a table for the main content area. In order to see the coding of the page I needed to use a page source view in my browser. The original files are all encrypted. On the surface this is to protect the IP rights. Underneath, it prevents a user from removing his affiliate links.

I suspect that would not be much of a problem as most of the installations that I have seen change nothing on the site. Some do not even take advantage of the opportunity to place their own ads in the available slots. I don’t think many even realize that they are doing more for him than he is doing for them.

There are extensive instructions and videos on how to promote your article site. Of course, you are really promoting for the developer as much as for yourself, so it is in his best interest for you to know how to promote your site.

One of the bullet points in the presentation of why you would want to put up one of his article directory sites is that you can submit your articles on your site. They will then be distributed throughout the network of sites. So, not only do you get an article directory, you also get an article distribution service – all for “free”.

I wrote one article and submitted it through my installation. When I checked the article had been added to the end of the category under which I had submitted the article. Most article directories list the most recent articles first. Often you may be on the main front page for only a few minutes and on the category front page for a few hours to a few days depending on the category. Adding new articles to the end of the list gets you no exposure.

The features on the submission page were also a bit lacking. There is no provision that I could find to edit your article. Neither is there a preview feature. The instructions also left something to be desired. I ended up with a broken link in my resource box because I guessed wrong on what was required, and had no way to fix the link. I don’t recall that there was a spell checker available for the submitted article. I don’t recall that there was an approval process for the articles. If that is the case expect that many of the articles will be of low quality.

After installing the new script I looked things over on my server. There are a large quantity of articles in one sub-directory. Another sub-directory has author bio pages. My name was not included even though I had submitted an article and probably filled out a bio page. I downloaded a file from a third directory at random. When I looked at the file in my text editor I found that it was encrypted. Next trip up to the server I will download one from the apparent article sub-directory and one from the author bio sub-directory to see if they are also encrypted.

There was one other way in which the actuality did not live up to the promise on the sales page. This may not be entirely the fault of the developer but it is the case none the less. One of the bullet points in the sales letter stated that if you dedicated a domain to the article script your domain would be listed in their directory of article sites. They send out a list of the sites every so often. The ones that I checked recently did not list my article directory site. I had emailed the url when I put up the site and I saw from analytics that they had checked the installation. After their server problems they did say to submit an article to insure that things were working properly. I did not do that and probably they are now generating the list from the article submissions rather than the email notification that I was asked to send. The ones on the list are probably the ones that are actively helping him promote himself.

My general conclusion about the Article Exchange Script are more negative than positive. Do I really want to promote him so much and me so little? I put the script up on the sub-domain space to check it out. I doubt that I will bother to reinstall it in the top level domain space. I can not recommend this script. It will populate a site with articles – and the developers affiliate links and commercial messages. There is limited chance of seeing any traffic, and the page rank of these sites is unlikely to grow so the link juice may not be so sweet.

I had a site on the domain and made it a menu item with the article directory script. I can just delete the script and rename the old index page and be back where I was before I installed the script on the site. I may just do that.

They recently looked at search term length from a couple of different points of view. They looked at the number of search terms used in searches and the number of terms used in searches that resulted in a click through. Their ad network keys off of search terms for many of the ads displayed, so their information is strong and relevant.

To determine the optimal word count, Chitika looked at a sample of 41,103,403 impressions of search traffic coming into their network between June 13th and 19th.  Within the sample, 10,710,579 impressions – some 26% of all search traffic – came from three-word searches.  The next top word counts were two-word (19%), four-word (17%), and finally one-word (14%).  Any query beyond five words will see dramatically lower traffic, throwing into perspective just how fragmented traffic from long queries really is.

Three word domain names are often recommended by IM pros. This data supports the value of the three word domain name, as an exact match of the domain name can often achieve a number one SERP. Their further research supports the value of the long tail in Internet Marketing:

Additionally, Chitika looked at the advertising click rate by word count to see how visitors’ intent was reflected by how many words they searched for. The highest ad click rates were for queries of 5, 6 and 4 words. The implication is that a more complex search is more likely to convert into revenue for a publisher, up to a point.

The long tail terms are shown to convert better. This gives some additional insight into your SEO efforts.

To read the full article and see the graphs that they include with the report see the article: SEO Sweet Spot – Three-Word Searches

Web PickUps is a viral email archive site. It has been amazing to me to see how many of these emails are searched for by subject. Since I started using the WordPress blogging software and the email subject line as a post title I have seen increasing traffic to the site. When I set up WordPress I followed the general thinking that I had gleaned from my research on the best ad location for this type of site. This site I have always expected to produce little in the way of ad revenue. That has been the case since I put up the site. Now the click rate has improved enough that my overall click rate including junk pages is nearly double my historic rate. And this is from a site where the visitors are not even shopping, they are looking for humor.

I have two other sites that get steady daily traffic. I will be moving the ad blocks on at least one of those sites  soon to see if the change makes a difference there. If the test proves successful I will move the position on the other site.

The ad block and position that are working on this site is a large rectangle located between the post title and post content on post pages. There is one other recommendation that I should implement here. I have a second ad block on the post pages in the right column. The recommendation is to only have one ad block and perhaps a link unit on a page. The theory is that the more ad blocks the lower the mean price of the ads presented will be. Google serves the higher priced ads first and then fills in with decending value ads. The more ad units on the page the more opportunities for a visitor to click on a lower value ad.

At first I thought that there was a direct correlation between visitors that arrived by search and click rate. It appears that the ad positioning is the defining factor. Those arriving by search for a subject line are sent to a post page rather than the front page of the blog. The front page has only the right column ad block. I should redo the ads using channel identifiers to determine which ad position is actually doing the job.

Of course, without traffic there are no clicks. My main objective must be to build traffic, but my recent experience shows that optimizing the monetization scheme can significantly improve the results.

Brian gives his analysis of the situation and some hints to avoid the same problem in a YouTube video (see below). Brian has several highly acclaimed IM products on the market. As an ethical business man, Brian wanted the people on his list to know exactly what the situation was. Many of these sites are used as examples in his products. I suspect an element of damage control also entered the picture.

The fact that Brian sent the notification shows that he cares about the people who have purchased his products. He is to be applauded for this action. He mentions that he has been through this before and that it is one of the dangers of Internet Marketing. He does make some suggestions of ways to minimize the danger.

Here is Brian’s YouTube Video on this situation:

The world is not always a kind place, but all you can do is follow the rules and do the best that you can.

I put up a research blog on sub-domain space. While I have owned the domain name for a couple of years, the sub-domain was created specifically for the WordPress installation. From the time that the sub-domain space was created until I was posting to the blog was no more than a couple of hours.

The idea with the blog is to go to Google trends and pick a current hot topic and produce a post. One of the very first posts that I made was indexed and I saw traffic from an international Google site, that turned out to be from Poland, in less than 24 hours. I was checking the traffic log to see if there was bot activity on the space when I saw the referrer link to the Google search. I thought that it was amazing and told a couple of people about the experience, as well as making a blog post on another blog.

I have just been snooping in the traffic logs again. This one comes from a different blog that I have had in operation for a few months. I was checking around Ezine Articles site today. I noticed an article using the same keyword that had brought traffic to the new blog. The article was a good fit for my other blog, on topic and all. I published the article. I logged in to the blog at 9:46 AM to post the article. At 12:25 Google returned search results with my post in the number 4 position and the Ezine original article in the number 6 position. Less than two hours and my reprint of the article was ranked higher than the original.

Looking at the results it is apparent that the reason the reprinted article returned higher than the original was because I had the exact search term as one of the tags for the article. The title and every word in the article was the same, but having the tag that matched the search term made the difference. Never underestimate the value of the tags that you apply to your posts. Think of good keywords that relate to the article or post. Us several long tail tags for the post. Add the tags to your thinking for on page SEO.

There have been several updates along the way. The latest update seems to operate a bit faster than earlier versions. I noticed this after the last update, but have not written it up on this blog. It is only an incremental speed up that I perceive subjectively so I did not think that it was worth a whole post.

The observation that inspires this post is something that I have noticed without taking note of what was going on in the past. I was just looking at the referrer search results and the revelation came to me. What I have seen in the search description box is some seemingly unrelated text. These were things that I did not recall having in the post but were showing up in the search results.

This evening I was looking through the referrer results on one of the blogs on which I am using the Deep Link Engine. The search term included words that I did not recall from the post. Then the light bulb lite. Part of the Keyword phrase was in one of the links that the Deep Link Engine had appended to the post, and the rest was in the post title. Google is indexing those links as part of the post. I had seen this before but not made the connection.

This had put the post at #5 on the first page of results. It is an unexpected benefit of using the Deep Link Engine. I don’t know that this plus outweighs some of the minuses from the DLE, but it is one of the first positive things that I have been able to say about the plug-in. I do see the small bump in traffic from the curious blogmasters when I make a post, and there are a few, mostly no-follow, links that appear on blogs that either have a benevolent blogger or the setting allows all comments and trackbacks.

The other side of the coin, as I have previously mentioned, is that the server address will end up on the Akismet black list. In confirmation of that I had linked from one of my blogs to another earlier today. I was telling the story of a page that has been hit with a Google slap on my Hobby Webmaster Blog. When I checked in on the linked blog I found my own trackback in the spam comments folder. Now that I have linked it here I will have to sort out this trackback from the spam comment folder on that site.

So, in this case, a post showed up high on a search result page because of a link that was placed with the post by the Deep Link Engine. This is really an accidental side effect of the DLE, but I had a visitor because of it.

In this post:  http://raygen.info/blog/2010/03/24/deep-link-engine-the-new-wordpress-trackbackpingback-spam/ on the RayGen.info site the blogger says that the product of the Deep Link Engine is ping/trackback spam and recommends that people not use this product. With my experience with the DLE I agree with all of his points.

I only used the DLE engine on this blog briefly and then discontinued using it as I saw how it worked. I have not installed it on my real blogs that are at all important to me. I have used it on what are basically hoped to be WordPress sales pages. I will probably discontinue use even on those sites. Initially there was a bump in traffic with each post. Lately the traffic boost has been insignificant.

I have also seen complaints about the time involved with completely removing the DLE and its tracks from a blog. I may gain experience in this in the not too distant future. If so I will report on my experience for the benefit of my readers.

Have you discontinued use of the DLE? Did you remove all traces of the links that it produced? Tell us in a comment!

Keywords are your keys to success in Internet Marketing. The most targeted consumers are the ones that arrive at your site through the search engines. The search engines use keywords to determine the relevancy of your site to the search being performed. Keywords are also used in Pay Per Click advertising to get your product or service in front of your target customer. Ideally you would find a keyword phrase with a high search count and low competition. Micro Niche Finder provides you with all of this information as well as alternate keywords with the associated information.

For a full featured keyword tool check out Micro Niche Finder today!

I have been using the new version of Micro Niche Finder since the day that it was released. I started with Micro Niche Finder six or seven months ago along about about version 4.2 I think. I just checked my USB key that MNF provides and it has says MNF3 so I may be confused, but I think that this is the first major update qualifying for a number increase that I have been through.

This update is truly a major update. There has been a complete rebuild of the code base. The GUI has been redesigned for the new version. There is now a tabbed window for the main screen that extends the capability of the program a great deal. The program loads and exits much faster than the older version. It also seems to be significantly more stable than the version with which I started.

I saw several features added through updates with MNF 4.x that extended the utility of the program. The program returns several key indicators to enable better, more thorough, keyword research. It queries multiple databases to return the information, and it does it on autopilot. You could do much of what the software does manually, but it would require several individual searches to obtain the data and then more thought and time to interpret the data.

Not only does MNF return data on the number of local searches and the exact phrase count for the various keyword phrases, but it also gives you algorithmic estimates on the strength of competition for the words.  In addition it can provide information on the backlinks associated with the keyword phrase and the estimated online commercial intent for the words. The ability to check domain name availability in the .com, .net, and .org top level domain space was added later in the 4.x line and is also a feature in the 5.x series. It will also search ClickBank, Amazon, and ebay to help you to find affiliate products to promote. The software will also search for related articles that can provide you with more information and give you some ideas about marketing your products.

Micro Niche Finder is a tool that can help you to produce results in your Internet Marketing efforts. Keyword research is where it all must begin. Many very successful Internet Marketers use Micro Niche Finder as their keyword tool. If you are interested in IM you should check out Micro Niche Finder today!