(snip)
I am increasingly asked to design WordPress websites, and asked to make them so they are easily findable on the first pages of a major search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. In fact, just today, I got an inquiry on this very matter. The client wants me to redesign their existing website using WordPress, so I can show them how to update and maintain it, AND they want people to be able to find the website on the first pages of a major search engine. …Two weeks ago, was the last inquiry I got on this very matter, so there is potential for work on 1 or 2 websites a month, if I can resolve this, potentially. …I would love to partner with a mentor webmaster who could either take on that end of the websites or could instruct me. I’m open, and would like to resolve this ASAP. …HELP ME!!!!
(some more snipped)

I’m not a SEO guy; I’m a web programmer (among other things) with some ideas about SEO.

I didn’t send them an email offering my elite services as a SEO guy to help them get first page results. I started off by pointing out that the first thing they needed to decide was the keywords they wanted to rank for– and that “camera lenses” would be a lot harder to rank for than “used canon lenses in Portland.” So the first step would be to define some better keywords.

And for on page SEO, frankly, you could do worse than WordPress- that is, with some SEO plugins, good choices of keywords, pretty URLs, you know, all that stuff a good webmaster would set up for you.

However, you also need to look at the kinds of content you have, the quantity and quality of links to your site and even the responsiveness of your web server.

In a handful of nutshells, you need quality posts that are over 300 words long, using but not overusing your keywords. They should be the kinds of posts that people who search for what you’re offering are looking for, helpful or interesting, or whatever.

You need “some” links. You can’t have an exact number because it’s not an exact science. If they’re all from hack blogs, you might need thousands of them. If they’re from solid domains with some personal accountability, you might need hundreds. But don’t run out and buy them all in one bunch, you want them to be gradually built up.

And starting last year, Google started factoring in the response time of your server; a more responsive server gets better results. Pages loading in a couple of seconds get better results than pages that take a minute to load.

However, keep in mind that none of these are really solid rules; they are differently weighted tests that you could consider as you go through a SEO offering. To add to that, Google (and probably Yahoo and Bing, but they’re less well publicized) changes its ranking algorithmic about once a year. So you might find that your carefully tweaked and optimized WordPress site sits at number seven for three months and suddenly slides to thirty three, and there were no changes.

What I try to tell people (but I believe most people don’t hear me) is that the search engines are trying to help people find stuff. They’re not “screwing the webmasters” or “being completely obtuse” or even “gaming the systems.” Search engines want to be used to find stuff. So make your stuff easy to find and worth finding, let the search engines do their dances, and just do your best in terms of making quality stuff.

All that being said, if you need a good Search Engine guy, talk to my friend Chris Bigler. I’ll post his email or something when I have it (should be Real Soon Now).

Keep in mind that this should be run at some interval with an average taken. Server load and speed should be taken into effect.

$ time wget –quiet –delete-after –page-requisites http://www.gmail.com

An example output is:
real 0m0.421s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.012s

“time” gives you how much time something took; the command after the time command. You want the “real” number.
“wget” is a great tool for downloading stuff from the web. The –page-requisites flag gets the CSS, JS, images and other things necessary for the page to be displayed. The other options (quiet, delete after) are just there to clean up the output.

This also doesn’t take into account how much time a browser might take arranging the pieces into a pie. A bunch of nested tables will cause the client to slow down. Not specifying image height and width will cause browsers to slow down. A slow computer … well, you get the idea. Run this and take an average of the REAL value and you should have a pretty good idea of how slow your site is.

Note
If you’re plugging this into a php script, keep in mind that “time” is outputting that into the STDERR stream.

[code]
tail -f access.log | cut -d\ -f9,11 | grep -v (domain name)
[/code]

That’s two spaces after the -d\; the backslash is escaping the space used as the delimiter. You may need different field numbers (9 and 11 are the ones for his combined logs that show the HTTP status code and the referrer). And of course I need to grep out the domain name of his site because it’s all over those lines.

Hope that helps ya.

While I’ve been around the internet a few times ( I’ve been here since 1993 ), I tend to think that SEO is easy. Using a tool like this does the quick tests for me and determines how well I’m doing. It gives good reminders for things like alt tags, description tags and the page title, and how well they match to the page.

My first thought was to generate the list and then post it to a blog using the “post via email” function; straightforward to generate a list, then an email and send it on its way.

I use site5 for hosting this site, and have the log files placed within my ~/logs directory on the server. I downloaded the most recent (last month’s) copy of the log file and unzipped it:

$> scp arghwebworks.com:logs/arghwebworks.com-Aug-2007.gz .
$> gunzip arghwebworks.com-Aug-2007.gz

then I opened it up and examined a few lines:

72.51.41.47 - - [31/Jul/2007:02:40:03 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 44785 "-" "Pingdom.com_bot_version_1.4_(http://www.pingdom.com/)"
66.249.66.1 - - [31/Jul/2007:02:40:05 -0400] "GET /2006/07/17/why-ajax-sucks/?paged=3 HTTP/1.1" 200 54123 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
212.247.189.113 - - [31/Jul/2007:02:41:04 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 44785 "-" "Pingdom.com_bot_version_1.4_(http://www.pingdom.com/)"

Note that your log format may change, and so if you use this perl script, you might have to play with the regular expression somewhat.

I wrote this perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl 

open (LOG, "arghwebworks.com-Aug-2007" );

my %referrers;
while (my $line=) {
	$line =~ m/\[.*\] ".*" \d{1,4} \d* "(.*?)"/;
	$testval = $1;
	$testval =~ s/\s+$//;
	$testval =~ s/^\s+//;
	unless ( $testval =~ m/http:..www.arghwebworks.com/  || $testval =~ m/http:..arghwebworks.com/ ) {

		if ( $testval gt '' && $testval ne '-' ) {
			$referrers{$testval}++;
		}
	}
} 

$count=0;
# this is some magic sort sequence. I'm not really sure how it works 
foreach $food ( sort { $referrers{$a} < $referrers {$b} } keys %referrers) {
		print "$food is $referrers{$food}.\n";
		$count++;
		if ( $count > 10 ) {
			exit();
		}
	}

Yeah, I know, it’s crap. It still runs quickly enough to give me the results in a matter of microseconds.

Here’s what I get back:

http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:PpXaEbSr1p4J:www.arghwebworks.com/%3Fpaged%3D5+mysql-bind+patch&hl=cs&ct=clnk&cd=14&gl=cz is 22.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:JfMyYqbaZYEJ:www.arghwebworks.com/%3Fp%3D70+procmailrc+cialis&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us is 7.
http://viagranwnc.blogspot.com is 7.
http://phentermine--mine.blogspot.com is 6.
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=search&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP is 5.
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:wMrxXb6B59EJ:arghwebworks.com/cwc_tgc/+tara%40welcomingcongregations.org&hl=fr&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=ci is 4.
http://buy65--rphentermine.blogspot.com is 4.
http://phenterminew0-q.blogspot.com is 2.
http://airline-rrr-tickets.blogspot.com is 1.
http://www.pingdom.com/tools/fpt/?url=www.arghwebworks.com is 3.
http://valium9-j.blogspot.com is 1.

I didn’t link those on purpose.

Look at this short list of URLs. Out of eleven, five of them contain the name of some drug. The top two are from a google search in Czech, and there are two other search engine queries (one of them references a client ). One is an obvious airline ticket splog., and one is a tool from pingdom.com.

Totally worthless.

If I were going to pursue this method, I’d want to be able to check the “spamminess” of a link. Any suggestions out there?

But everyone else thinks they will.

If you’re going to make money from Google Arbitrage, the first thing you need is a niche. Suppose you had a means for generating a list of keywords and how much search traffic they had. You could sell access to your list. ( To be honest, that site has a free offer as well.)

You probably also want some advice. Jonathan Leger is a programmer who has done some work to “help other people make money.” His three-way-link site is a cunning way to help people get better search engine love with their little niche sites. Which would lower the cost of advertising (in a roundabout way). A lower cost of advertising is the other thing people who want to make a killing at Arbitrage need.

Yesterday, my example paid me $35 in a month ( gross, before I subtracted the $300 in advertising ). An account on the three-way-links site pays Jonathan $47 dollars. His advertising costs ( I imagine) are low. However, imagine if he sells 100 accounts. That’s $4700 each month. And it’s recurring; he will get this money for quite some time, and he can stop paying the advertising and still earn the money.

No, I don’t know how many accounts he has, and no, I don’t know how much he’s spending on advertising.

I’m not picking on Jonathan. His sites and his techniques are extremely smart. Nor am I picking on the nichebot guys; they’re doing the same thing I’m telling you to do. In fact, I think they’re more honest in some ways than most arbitrageurs.

When I was a kid, there was a comic strip ( I think it was spy vs spy in Mad Magazine) where two people got into a pie throwing contest. Anne bought ten pies and threw them at Bob. Bob bought ten pies and threw them at Anne. Both people wound up covered in pie, and both people had fun throwing pie at the other person. But who “won”?

The pie merchant.

If you want to make a killing from Google Arbitrage, my advice to you is to be the pie merchant. Find something that people who are trying to make money on the internet need, whether it’s keywords, links, hosting, templates, project management, whatever. Find that thing and sell it to everyone.

For instance, suppose I go to Clickbank and find an ebook that sells for ten dollars. The seller gives the advertiser a 50% cut, so if I steer people to his site and they buy a book, I make five bucks. Of course, every person who goes to his site won’t buy the book, suppose the “conversion rate” is a high five percent (two percent is normal). So for every twenty people I send to his site, I make five bucks.

Now suppose I decide that people just aren’t coming to my site fast enough, and I’m only making five dollars a month. I want to get more people coming in, and so I go to google adwords and set up an account. My ad program will pay one dollar per click for each person to come to my site. I set up the plan with a daily budget of $10. So I get ten clicks a day from this program. The user “converts” on my site to the seller’s site; assume I do a fantastic job of selling the seller’s stuff, and five people per day go to his site. It takes me four days to make one sale ( I make $5 ), and in four days I’ve spent $40. I’m $35 in the hole!. By the end of the month I’ve spent $300 to earn $35 dollars.

To make money from arbitrage, you need two things; one, a product that converts very well, and two, ads with a very low cost. As you can imagine, these things are a premium; if a product converts very well, everyone’s trying to sell it and the cost of the ad skyrockets. If the cost of the ad is very low, the product won’t convert very well.

Google Arbitrage uses the Adsense advertisements as the “product that converts very well.” Basically, you build a five page site stocked with keywords and hook up adsense advertisements to it. Now, you have a site that should get good pagerank, and if you “SEOize” it right, you should get some nominal traffic. Second, you purchase adwords advertisements ( remember, you need a low cost advertising niche ), and send traffic your way. If it’s done “right,” you will earn more money from Adsense than you would spend on adwords.

I think Google Arbitrage is legal. I’m not a lawyer, so take that as the opinion of some computer geek. Basically, you’re gambling that your site is good enough, your adsense costs are low enough, and your conversion and payouts are high enough to make it worth your while.

I’m not sure it’s “honest.” Most of the sites people set up for Google Arbitrage are scraped from other sites, poorly done clumps of keywords, et cetera. Some poor schmuck worried about his aunt Marjorie searches google for “High Blood Pressure” and finds a site dedicated to high blood pressure– it’s got articles someone scraped from the Wikipedia and it’s heavily adsensed. While he’s looking at it, he clicks on one of the adsense ads and the ( and here’s a nice fancy word for you ) arbitrageur makes fifty cents. Did he get the information he needed? I hope so. But my main beef is that the ( here’s that word again. No I don’t know how to pronounce it ) arbitrageur isn’t adding anything to the mix; there’s no actual new information on the scrape site.

I’ve heard that Google is looking at how to stop arbitrage like this. I don’t think they will. I don’t have any hard numbers but I’m sure there’s more people either making small amounts or losing money betting on arbitrage than there are people earning the five or six figure payouts that certain people advertise. I think arbitrage is a cash cow for Google. And to emphasize the point; if you have a google Adwords bill for $25 dollars, you pay it that month, right away. If you have a google Adsense “earnings” of $25, you don’t get it right away — you get it after you total (currently) $100 ( they don’t pay under a hundred bucks if you want a check ). And they have a month between when you break the hundred dollar barrier and when they cut the check to verify their results. How many of us would like to borrow $25 a month for four months from a hundred thousand people, and then pay that money back at the end of four months? Even if you break even, Google wins.

I’m not complaining about Google. I run Google adsense everywhere. I just don’t think that Google arbitrage is a very good way to make money. It’s not smart and it’s not safe.

I have some ideas on better ways to make money from Arbitrage though, and I’ll talk about them tomorrow.

The domain cost about eight dollars. The hosting is free ( thanks to a friend). I spent about six hours writing the code and two hours on the layout; eight hours. Some clients have paid me $25/hour, and that’s the minimum a previous employer told me to accept.

So I’ve spent about $210 on this site. Let’s see how much it’s earned me…

Google Adsense for Elibratto.com? $ 0.00.
Amazon Affiliate for Elibratto.com? $ 0.00.

Currently it has a page rank of 3, and at least one first page result; for ‘memoirs-best sellers’”.

Domain renewal time is coming up; another $10. (just round figures).

Do I leave it up, and let it sit there, or do I let it die, or do I spend some more time either working on SEOing the pages or adding new things, ( more of a time investment ), or do I try a different domain name ?

I suspect a different domain name (one with actual “books” in the title ) might be better. A ten-dollar investment isn’t so bad, but another two or three hundred dollars worth of programming might be a bad idea.

What do you think?

Our baseline is the Quiz 4 Cash site. The current traffic to Quiz for Cash is fairly small. On day one, we looked at some of the content of the site, discussed adding a Search function, and rewriting some titles. On day two, we’re going to look at some more direct means of getting traffic to your site.

First, create an account (or log into your account) at delicious, and bookmark your site. Make sure to tag it with appropriate tags. This is useful both because it’s a social bookmark (other users may search for your tag and find your site) but also because it’ll show you how many other people bookmarked it. Then create accounts (or log into your accounts) at digg and reddit. Add links to your site to both of these services, using words from your key phrases and your tags you used at delicious (which should be roughly the same).

Go to your favorite text editor (probably notepad or wordpad). It’s usually under the start button, then accessories. If you’re using a Macintosh, then it’s probably something like simpletext. But if you’re using linux, just use whatever you normally use. Either open up your signature file if you already have one, or create a new file. In this file, put two hyphens at the top, and then beneath that your name, then your website. Save this file in your documents folder as something like “mailsig.txt”. In your email program, assuming you’re using Thunderbird, go to “tools” and then “account settings.” Check the box that says “use this signature file” and then browse to where you saved this file. Click on this and save the changes to your settings. Now every time you send an email, you’ll also send your domainname to the person who gets the email.

The last thing we’ll do today is post our web address to Usenet. There are appriximately 100,000 groups on Google Groups. Do a search for a general group that applies to your site. For the quiz4cash site, I’d recommend “rec.games.trivia. Post an announcement here. There is a “new post” link over on the right side. The more interesting you make it, the more people will follow it; people on the news groups like this can be fairly resistant to advertising.