Thrudigital

Since I have been a Google AdSense user for quite a long time (almost three years), I wanted to know how Google AdWords searches, in order to understand how advertisers view my websites. After I registered and paid a small fee, I was able to start exploring how it works. I tried to run a few campaigns, to attract targeted visitors to my forum, and to other pages that were selling some stuff. Everything worked well – I noticed some clicks, some conversions and I was quite pleased with how it worked. Until, one day when I ran reports and realised that many clicks came from parked domains, and that on many websites the CTR was excessively high compared to impressions.

Why is this a real problem and what does it mean?
I don’t mind paying for clicks that came from websites where my ads were shown repeatedly, as I know that these are natural clicks. These websites are usually either forums or sites featuring high-quality content. It is normal for such websites to receive thousands of visitors each day, and so I don’t mind, but why do parked domains generate such high CTR? Why did I pay for clicks on websites where my ad was shown only 2 or 3 times? There’s no great conspiracy theory, but the whole thing is certainly suspicious. Based on my own experiences, CTR does vary between 0.50% and 10% on particular pages. The more relevant content, the more clicks these pages receive.

In order to explain the problem of parked domains, we must understand why this business model exists. It’s nothing more than arbitrage. Parked domains’ traffic must be poor since they cannot rank well in Google (though I have seen some exceptions). Thefore, their traffic sources usually originate in PPC campaigns. Sometimes, CPM advertisements are also used to promote parked domains. Essentially, they buy traffic and sell clicks. It is very unusual to see a parked domain advertised in AdWords, though other advertising networks often perform very well for parked domains. All in all, these domains generate some traffic. Of course, this doesn’t answer the question why parked domains generate so high CTR. I tried parking a domain and in the end I received no clicks. So, there must be a problem within: I suppose that parked domains are the most common source of click-fraud.

Also why do some websites of low quality generate high CTR?

Again, I suppose that these are very common source of click-fraud. It’s very easy: I create a community of clickers, and we’ll click on each other’s ads. This is a quick route to a ban from AdSense, but for some people it’s the only way to earn revenue from AdSense. Some interesting posts on this subject can be found here. So, this is just another reason why on some websites your AdWords campaign “performs” well (a large number of clicks, but very few conversions).

After realising that I had paid for crap clicks, I started writing an email to the AdWords team, but before clicking on the send button I decided to give up. I lost only about £20, and there is really no need to worry about such an amount. I was very careful and conservative with my AdWords campaign and this proved wise.

Just imagine that I could achieve at least 20% or 30% CTR (these numbers are far from the average parked domains’ CTR generated within my AdWords campaign!) on my AdSense account. Put simply, I’d be a millionaire today if this were true. Instead of such high figures, I usually see CTR varying between 2% and 3% in my AdSense statistics. That’s very low in comparison to parked domains, isn’t it? So really, there is something fishy about parked domains or websites with poor content.

These are the reasons why you should target your AdWords campaign at particular websites instead of using keyword-targeting. You’ll pay more, but you can also be sure that such ads won’t prove to be a waste of money. It’s more profitable to get 10-20 clicks per day with a conversion rate of 10% than 100-200 clicks with conversion of 0.05%.

Be aware that if your conversions mean registration (free registration), you could achieve high conversion from ads shown on parked domains. Though you’ll no doubt be pleased to see such a high conversion ratio, these newly registered members could well be fake due to the existence of “clicks exchange networks” that are often based on the “behave naturally” principle. Simply put: these newly-registered people probably won’t return to your website, and they won’t buy any products either.

Google AdWords is good, but make sure that you know what you’re doing. There are some clicks that are just too suspicious.

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Today, I noticed an attempt to hack one of my websites. The attack wasn’t successful, but however it revealed a few minor places to improve. In order to help you secure your website from hackers, I am writing this step-by-step guide to protecting your site. Let’s start from beginning. I’m also attaching a few snapshots to help you understand better what happened to me.

The easiest way to hack a website is by sending a large volume of random requests. To maximise the potential success, invalid URLs are used as well. Invalid URLs are URLs that include characters that try to break MySQL queries (and eventually querys through other database systems). In general, this technique is useless if your website doesn’t send/receive parameters via URLs. However, for any website which is really dynamic, parameters are necessary to let a visitor communicate with the server. For example, imagine a simple search query: if there is a form that allows one to type search terms, then even this one form can be potentially a gateway to hacking a website. In PHP there is a simple way to avoid such vulnerabilities. All MySQL queries must be protected, thus using -

$variable = addslashes(htmlspecialchars($_REQUEST['something']));

is more than necessary. It is a must! What do these functions do to help you? The addslashes function transforms all variables’ values that contain quotes into friendly format, as you probably know if you use this to excecute MySQL queries.

mysql_query($query,$link);

Then the $query variable must contain only two ordinary quotes. Others must be in a friendly MySQL format (“….\”…“ for instance). The htmlspecialchars function helps you to prevent PHP scripts and MySQL data from attempting to insert vulnerable code into data fields or break the scripts and reveal information used by website’s core. In such a way it is possible to find all files, usually to modify them, delete them, or add vulnerable PHP/HTML code to the website. So in the first instance, always protect scripts from queries that can be sent by anyone at any time.

The next very important protection is login area protection. There are bots that try various combinations of logins and passwords. If any user uses a weak password, it is very possible that their account will break under such an attack! This is why you must use two ways of prevention (preferably 3):

1) Use strong passwords;
2) If a login attempt has been unsuccessful (say) 5 times within (say) 1 minute or less, block the account for another (say) 30 minutes and block the originating IP addresses;
3) For important accounts, use an IP-based + password protection (a login attempt must come from predefined IP addresses)

The login process can be additionally secured with CAPTCHA protection (the same applies to the registration areas!)

OK, you’re almost done. Now it is needed to track attempts to hack your website. Every attempt must be recorded for further analysis or to take further action against hackers. I recommend these information to be stored in a log: timestamp, IP address, etc. This data is necessary to stop the attack in the shortest possible space of time after it started. How can we do this? On your server you should have a folder where the script saves log files as text files. For example, only those logs which ended as a failure (disallowed characters within URLs; say that something.php?u=1 can contain only u=1 or u=2, so u cannot be anything else, and if it is, then it is considered as an attempt to hack) should be stored. The script should save these logs immediately after such a script is called. After saving, a function that compares logs should be called. The result of our imaginary function can be “Allow”, or “Disallow”. If the disallow option is the result, the document is redirected to an error page where you explain all reasons of doing this redirect. You must not use MySQL for storing logs because if your server returns a MySQL error “too many connections“, then the scripts won’t be able to thwart any potential attack! Also, any filesystem is faster than a database system.

As I indicated above, there could be a problem with too many connections. This happens when too many requests are sent to a server. The only working strategy how to thwart these attacks is denying requests from same IP addresses. A human visitor WILL not send more than 1 request per second (consider the period of 10 seconds to be the average, measure requests per 10 seconds; a human user will not send more than 10 queries to your server during these 10 seconds!). Actually, a human visitor will hardly make 5 requests during 10 seconds. I recommend you to block everyone who sends more than 10 requests during 10 seconds. Except Google. Google can send more than 2-3 requests per second, thus resolving the hostname is necessary too.

Apart from hacking attempts, sending too many requests doesn’t have to reveal potential vulnerabilities. Do not forget to turn off the error reporting in PHP. Below is a very handy function that don’t show the MySQL error. Instead of using

mysql_query("...",$link)
or die("..." . mysql_error());

use

mysql_query("...",$link)
or some_die_function(__FILE__,__LINE__);

Where the some_die_function sends you an email and terminates the script showing some error message to the visitor. This way you assure that no details are shown to the visitors and hackers!

This system may sound too complicated, but it really helps. At least make sure that no error is shown to the user. Even if your website is down, you still control everything. Checking your logs can help you find out what happened. The function that reports errors tells you exactly what happened. Next time you can be better prepared. Look at the snapshot below: The attack lasted only 5 minutes (the snapshot is just a small section of the report), and then subsided. If it happens again, everything will be secure.

The IP ending with .166 was one of the attackers.

By the way: always use strong passwords. And use Linux!

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These days I have been receiving a lot of spam trying to do something to my domains. It purports to be an official email from Network Solutions, but the links within the emails point to subdomains under sys57.biz. I just wanted to share this experience, so you’re aware of these emails…

Dear Network Solutions® Customer,

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:22:55 +0300 we received a third party complaint of invalid domain contact information in the Whois database for this domain Whenever we receive a complaint, we are required by ICANN regulations to initiate an investigation as to whether the contact data displaying in the Whois database is valid data or not. If we find that there is invalid or missing data, we contact both the registrant and the account holder and inform them to update the information.

Please note: ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) regulations state that the WHOIS Administrative Contact may initiate and approve domain name registration transfers from your Network Solutions account to other Registrars. If you are not listed as the WHOIS Administrative Contact a transfer can occur without your knowledge if Domain Protect is not enabled for the domain name registrations listed above.

To change the WHOIS Administrative Contact Information for any of your domains, please login to Account Manager:

1. Log in to Account Manager at: http://www.networksolutions.com (after clicking this link points to sys57.biz).
2. Click on the “Profile & Accounts” tab in the left navigation menu to be taken to a page listing your account details.
3. Click on “Accounts” and select the account you wish to edit.
4. Click “View/Edit WHOIS Contacts” to make your updates.

If you believe someone requested this change without your consent, please contact Customer Service.

If you would like to order additional services or to update your account, please visit us online.

Thank you for choosing Network Solutions. We are committed to providing you with the solutions, services, and support to help you succeed online.

Sincerely,
Network Solutions® Customer Support

The best part of this is that my domains are registered with a different registrar.

We hear it everywhere: online shops, websites earning from AdSense, websites being sold for millions of dollars and so on. But for every business activity one needs investments. In this article let’s analyse the two options depending on what you plan to do.

The first option of investing in a website is a share-based business model, when two or more people put together a large sum of money and start a web business. It necessarily doesn’t have to be a website built from scratch since it is possible to buy (or invest in) pre-existing projects. For example, I have seen some websites with unique ideas which could generate a lot of money, but they are lacking in some respects. The first of such aspects is a lack of content. Even though it is easy to create content in a timely manner, webmasters often stop developing their websites due to insufficient volume of required investments, or because of a lack of financial return on their time investment. Let’s ignore all possible reasons and take a look at what we can do there:

1) We can buy a share in such websites (there are inherent risks in this kind of investment, which we will cover later);
2) We can buy entire websites (as an individual or a group of investors).

A share-based ownership of websites brings one big stumbling-block: the attitude of “I do this, you do that. If you don’t it, I don’t do it either”. To be honest, I have had a terrible experience with this problem. A few years ago I started two websites, investing both my time and money into them, and even though I got a return on my investment, the growth of these website has stopped because my business partner isn’t doing anything. Naturally, I don’t do anything either. The best thing that you can do when running an investment with more than one person is to sign some kind of legal agreement in order to protect you from such situations. These websites are earning enough to pay for their hosting, plus they generate some extra cash each month, but it isn’t anything impressive. Apart from this horrible experience, I am also planning to invest a few thousand dollars, in order to boost their growth and achieve an acceptable level of revenue from them.

Buying a share in websites can be tricky. Firstly, you must be sure that there is a plan of further growth (if there isn’t one yet, undertake the responsibility yourself, perhaps for an additional share) of such a website. The plan must contain these points at least:

1) What is your target audience?
2) What kind of time-frame are you working on?
3) What are your expected results?

Logically, this should explain the way to achieve satisfactory results. Your development strategy is also very important and should be included within the plan. In addition, the plan must contain at least two different strategies, so that if one fails, you have a backup to help meet your goal. None of this would be possible without a clear plan of further development. Features make the difference between successful and ordinary websites. Websites which contain only plain content are worth investing if only you add some extra features to the core. For example: would you buy an article directory? I wouldn’t. I’d do it if only I had a plan of adding extra value to such a website.

Bear in mind that we are still analysing the first option (buying a share in websites), so it is always wise to discuss your plans with your business partners, unless you own the majority share. The original owner or majority owner doesn’t have to share your feelings and thoughts.

In my opinion, the better choice is to buy an entire website (either alone or with business partners). I’d even recommend investing alone rather than sharing the revenue with others. This, however, depends on your skills and available funds. Sometimes you need a programmer who will work for 10% or 20% of the revenue. In essence, any situation when you own more than 50% is preferable, because you can do what you want.

There may be some problems with investing bigger amounts (say, more than $50,000) into websites. It’s all about ROI (Return Of Investment): a reasonable ROI in a web-based business is up to 4-5 years, although many want their money back in 20 months or less. I wouldn’t mind buying a website that earns $5000/year for $35,000-45000, if I saw a chance of growth, a potential, a plan. This is why some websites are worth millions, and others aren’t worth a penny. The plan and the potential make the difference.

If you don’t know how to increase your ROI, or if you have no idea of what to do later with the website, then do not invest. I’d also like to recommend that you try to diversify your income sources. Selling ad space is a good idea, and using more ad-serving programs is good for this purpose. If one fails, another saves the business.

If you have any particular question, feel free to post a comment.

By the way: now, with the financial crisis ruining many businesses, is a good time to make an investment. It may sound weird, but these days things are cheaper than they were five years ago, or will be in five years time. Revenue from advertising hasn’t peaked yet, due to the unwillingness of advertisers to spend money there. They cut unnecessary bills, and many fire employees. When the crisis ends, online advertising will surely increase, and everything will become considerably more expensive than it is now. Many websites may be having problems staying online these days, and fewer new websites are created every day (meaning fewer competitors.) Only the strongest will survive.

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Better rankings and increased organic traffic usually generate more money for the webmaster. Since I spend a lot of time describing ways to increase your organic traffic (you’re welcome to browse these articles), let’s focus on how and why fresh content helps you achieve higher rankings, and thus more sales or advertising revenue. As already mentioned in this article, the most important part of SEO is to understand what visitors want.

No matter what method you use to understand the needs and expectations of visitors, you have likely found that a one-page website cannot cover all these needs. This is why I am strictly against one-page websites (which we usually find selling things or acting as click-banks). A one-page website cannot satisfy most visitors. So, how is this related to our current problem? Simply put: the more pages on your website, the higher traffic volume you are likely to receive.

How can we create enough pages?
Here, webmasters often face another problem: they aren’t skilled enough, they are lacking in knowledge: put simply, they heard somewhere that articles about health problems are the best-earning ones in the Google AdSense program, so they paid some Indian writers to write (actually they rewrote only pre-existing articles) 20-30 articles, and then wait for a huge income. But, as time goes by, it doesn’t come. Where is the problem? The problem’s cause is very simple: the webmasters don’t create new content, thus the site doesn’t develop. It doesn’t grow!

In order to avoid this situation, one should start a website devoted to some topic in which he is skilled. Otherwise, I see no sense in this. Finally, let’s move to the point of this article (why fresh content helps SEO).

Let’s divide the word fresh into two possible meanings:

1) The word fresh is meant as “one page is updated on a regular basis.” This is a myth, there is no relation between on-page updates and rankings.
2) The word fresh is meant as “new pages are added to the website as fast as possible.” In this case, there is a direct connection between the addition of new pages and traffic/rankings.

Thanks to my previous articles on this blog, it isn’t necessary to explain how to find suitable topics for new pages. Instead, do some simple math:

Based on previous experiences and statistics, let’s say that each page on your website earns £3/month. This is an average, so when one page earns £200/month, and another does £0.50/month only, then the average would be £100.25 per month per page. Be pessimistic, and work on a figure of £3/month/page. Before we start calculating, it is necessary to mention that these statistics must be based on a large number (10-20 or more) of pages, to ensure statistical accuracy. So, if one page earns £3/month, then 100 pages could earn £300/month. Simple, isn’t it?

Generally speaking, it is very easy to create 1 or 2 good articles (or pages) per day. After 50-100 days spending 2-3 hours each day writing fresh content, it’s possible to earn an additional £300 a month. Of course, £300/month is nothing, but you got the idea. Spend one year doing this, and when you’re done, there are more than 365 new pages on your website. That’s a much nicer number: 365x£3 equals £1095. An additional £1095/month isn’t that bad, and this is considering that we calculated this figure at only £3/month/page. If it’s £5/month/page, or even more, then your potential revenue rises still further.

Don’t forget that this article is not one of those “buy web-hosting, get a thousand copied articles from article directories, and you will earn thousands of dollars each month!“ articles. I never said that an online business is an easy way to make money. I know that being employed and sitting in some warm and quiet place is much easier, but I like challenges.

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If you have visited other websites that explain how to increase traffic to a website, then you’re probably used to points like “Get links, write content, use RSS”, etc. But are these tips really worth it? They’re very general in their scope. So nowadays almost every “SEO guru” (though many people call themselves ‘gurus’ despite being completely unskilled) recommends these general tips, making it very easy to get lost. You hear the same story from every site, but almost no-one tells you what exactly to do. And of course, they can’t tell you! Because being a guru means more than having 2-3 top positions for phrases which consist of 3 or 4 words! Because being an SEO guru means more than getting 500 or 1000 monthly visits to a website! So let’s take a look at one of most successful methods for increasing traffic to a website.

Firstly, there are a few prerequisites which must be met when you want to use this strategy. They are:

1) Your website must be indexed by Google
2) Your website must have more than 30-40 pages of content, all of the pages should be indexed, each page must contain at least 400 words
3) Your website must be receiving some organic (free traffic from search engines) already
4) You must be using Google Analytics or any other application which allows you to analyse your website’s traffic

If you don’t meet these criteria yet, then go and create some new pages and some useful content. And if your website qualifies, then let’s look at the following ideas:

Increasing traffic to a website can, in general, be accomplished with two things: links and content. Let’s focus on content since this is faster and completely under the control of the webmaster. Also, content of good quality will bring your web pages new links! So the question is “What new content should I add to my website?” This is actually the most important question out of all: if you answer it correctly, then you will have won. And if you fail to answer it, then other websites will overtake you in the rankings. So, the brainstorming continues…

The best option is to add content that people like. But what do people like? One must know search queries in order to answer this. But how to find search queries? Analyse the traffic. It’s really very easy! For this purpose you need an analytics tool – Google Analytics, for instance. Let’s take a look:

The above snapshot shows a few of the phrases that led to this blog from Google. You should know that web-developers.net had only a few top positions for these phrases and for more than 5 phrases this website wasn’t ranked in the top10! This means that if I add new content based on these phrases (logically, not all phrases can be included within one page, and some phrases don’t make sense, but the majority are clear), then I could bring new visitors to this website with very little effort. If you don’t believe that it really works, then I give you this example:

235 visits led to my domain answers.aqua-fish.net during the last month. Of course, 235 visits per month is nothing. But the most important fact is that I just picked up questions from Google Analytics and paid a few people to answer these questions. I did no link building at all! The only way I increased/generated traffic was via the strategy of analysing traffic and integrating phrases into the website’s content. Nothing more. Easy, isn’t it? Also bear in mind that answers.aqua-fish.net isn’t yet fully indexed in Google (although site:answers.aqua-fish.net shows 525 results, only the first 15 pages are available yet. Approximately 150 pages are indexed at the time of writing). I am expecting to see between 1500 and 3000 monthly visits there soon (in two to three months or so). I could then answer another 1000 questions, and this will surely attract more and more visitors! Do you see the increasing trend in traffic?

Isn’t this simple? It’s so simple that many webmasters don’t realise that such a strategy really exists. Also consider reading this post where you can learn other methods of increasing traffic to your website.

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Translation of a website is a good way to attract potential customers or visitors to your web presentation. Since English is generally the most common language on the internet, I’ll assume that you’re interested in other languages (and that your website is already available in English). However, translations are not cheap, thus your plan must be carefully thought-out. It’s easier when your website shows Google AdSense ads because you doesn’t need to worry about clients. Ads will be shown and sooner or later the investment will return. Everything is harder when translating an online shopping website, or a non-profit organisation.

Instead of giving you my opinions, let me demonstrate with a real example:

A long time ago I hired a woman to translate my website (once again, I’m talking about aqua-fish.net) from English into French. Due to lack of funds, the situation didn’t allow me to invest more than a few hundred dollars. However, it wasn’t possible to spend more for another reason: the translator was cheating on the translation, using an automated tool in the belief that I wouldn’t find out, as I don’t speak French. Eventually, I found out and stopped paying her. After a year, I decided to invest in another French translation, this time with an unrelated third party verifier. Before going into details regarding cost, here is the image showing the increase in traffic from France:

The highlighted column shows visits. The other columns are irrelevant to this example. So, the investment (approximately $3000) did drive some additional traffic to my website. Moreover, there is a continuing trend in this type of traffic, since many articles are still new (and some are not yet published), therefore they do not yet have a high position in Google.

Of course, the revenue has increased too. Due to the necessity of translating (and verifying) the existing articles, the whole revenue from the French version can be considered as part of the ROI. At this point, the ROI seems to be 2.05 years (nearly 25 months), which is actually very good. Naturally, the ROI on such an investment gets better as time goes by, because the older the articles are, the better the positions in search engines they acquire. So, if ROI was 25 months and not less, then it would be still a good business model.

Other major languages to consider are Spanish, Russian, German. Of course, the more articles, the better.

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Without any pointless discussion of how useless reciprocal links are, I’ll move to the crux of this article’s idea: if all top-ranked websites, grouped by niches (web design, pet care, travel, economy news, and so on), established reciprocal links between each other, they would create an unbreakable net of top-ranked websites. I don’t mean an automatic “reciprocal links directory”, but quality human-edited web pages with links to other related websites. Let me explain with this example:

Websites A, B, C, D, E and F are ranked in the top 6 for some imaginary phrase. The problem is that none of these websites link to each other, thus their relevance is based upon other factors. So, for a search engine, there is no direct connection between these websites. Each depends on links from other sources (although often one such source may link to websites A, B, and C and eventually to D, E, and F as well), however they (websites A-F) operate in the same field and offer similar services. Now picture a crappy website (say a website X) which bought a lot of links with targeted anchor texts. Sooner or later this website can break the A-F circle and can even settle in first position. The A-F websites will receive fewer hits, thus will generate lower sales and falling revenue. All of these effects are connected to just one fact: competitors don’t like to link to each other.

In the past I found one webmaster from Australia (the owner of e-aquarium.com.au) and we linked related articles on our websites. The result is that my website (aqua-fish.net) receives more hits from Australia than if it had no such links. It also works in the inverse: the fact that my website is hosted in the US helps his website increase their hits from the US. We did not spam, and we did not pay each other for links: it is all natural traffic. Now imagine that I could find more such webmasters with larger websites, and that we’d exchange links. Then it would become very hard for poor websites to gain top rankings for competitive phrases.

Where two fight, third one wins.

As we do everything possible in order to move from the 4th position in Google to the 2nd or 3^rd, while our current competitors do the same thing, someone more clever shins up higher…

The reason why newly-created websites have greater potential to get top rankings than existing websites have is simple: top-ranked websites’ webmasters usually feel comfortable with what has already been achieved. They are happy to see their websites somewhere in the top 5 or 10. It’s unavoidable that one day, some new website (it may be an old website, but without previous SEO) damages their position. Every webmaster wants to see their website ranked in the top 5 or 10 for all major phrases. The desire to succeed is usually stronger in those who just started than in those who are already playing, and whose rankings have been stable for 2-3 years. It’s like a disease: Everything is fine until you get sick. Then nothing is more important than health..

So don’t dawdle: ask your top competitors to exchange links. Create reciprocal links in order to prevent someone else breaking into your positions.

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Using different CSS classes for links is quite easy, but many newbie webmasters don’t know what exactly to do. So they end up with using the font tag within the a tags, or they use span tags instead of going the easy (and correct) route. The solution is this:

Say that in the source code of your website (XHTML) you are going to link to web-developers.net, but you want to differentiate the link from all other links. To do this, you should use this:

<a href="http://www.web-developers.net" target="_blank" class="external_link_1">web-developers.net</a>

Of course, assume that the class external_link_1 has not yet been defined in the CSS file. Now, add these lines

a:link.external_link_1
{
color: #105286;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:active.external_link_1
{
color: #105286;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:visited.external_link_1
{
color: #105286;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover.external_link_1
{
color: Black;
text-decoration: underline;
}

This does the work for you. You can modify the layout of such links by adding/modifying the external_link_1 CSS class. Before I mention the most used CSS properties, make sure that your XHTML file links to the CSS file. This can be done by placing the following code between <head> and </head> tags:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="./style.css" type="text/css" />

The CSS properties I use most often for links are:

font-family, font-style, font-size, color, text-decoration. However, there are many more available than these. This link is particularly useful.

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In this article I am going to go through my SEO techniques from A to Z.

The first SEO technique is in your domain name. Believe it or not, this is true even with an old domain name that lacks primary keywords. If your domain name is missing the most important words, then go ahead and buy a new, more SEO-friendly domain name! Your website may lose organic traffic for a month or two (when thrudigital.com was redirected to web-developers.net, we lost all organic traffic from Google, but this started to return after a couple of months), but after finishing the process or re-indexing and re-crawling, you will return to your previous positions. I do not understand why search engines pay so much attention to the domain name (because in my opinion domains formatted as “word1word2word3word4.com” are too long, hard to remember, and basically useless), but with the way search engine algorithms work, we must use keywords in domains and URLs. Personally speaking, I wish that domain names weren’t considered when calculating rankings!

The second SEO technique is another absurdity, again unrelated to quality of content (thus also pages returned as a result of a search query). It’s the title tag. Title tags can be manipulated very easily, so I don’t understand why search engines takes this into consideration. But, as above, title tags must be optimised. Optimisation of title tags is simple: if you want to have higher chances of being ranked in the top 10 for “cell phones”, it is necessary to mention the phrase “cell phones” within the title tag. The fewer words you use, the better. However, it is still possible to rank well with long title tags. See this search query for example.

The third technique is to use clean XHTML code: no tables, no frames. Simplicity is everything. I have no objection regarding the use of this factor in the formula of algorithms. In fact, I’d welcome more weight to be given to this factor, since many websites with ugly code rank well in Google. Often, such websites don’t work properly in browsers other than Internet Explorer.

The fourth of my SEO techniques are the h1 and h2 headings. These can help move your website up by 30 or even 40 positions. When it’s ranked 30th, then I strongly recommend to add the h1 and h2 headings to the content. This would be perfect if there was no CSS. Many webmasters manipulate the layout of these headings via CSS. After making these modifications, headings look like ordinary text. Use it, but be prepared for your competitors to do the same thing. This is an on-site factor, so what you can do, others can do too.

The fifth of my SEO techniques is a well-linked website. Linking between pages is necessary to tell search engines that you really want your website’s visitors to be able to navigate easily. It is not important to use only one form of anchor text when linking to pages. It must all look natural. Since the vast majority of webmasters have no idea how programming languages work, this is where you can take a real lead over the competition.

The sixth SEO technique is content. Although this is the sixth, it is also the most important. There is nothing more to say: high-quality content will bring you success sooner or later. Poor content will result in bad rankings.

The seventh of my SEO techniques is “the additional value” given to your website’s visitors. Everyone can write an article, but only a few can write really useful articles. Unfortunately, nowadays there are hundreds of firms which offer copywriting services. Again (unfortunately), many copywriters just rewrite articles from other websites. And this is why unique articles have no chance against unethical SEO techniques. In order to prevent this from happening, one should write articles within a particular plan and to fit the website it will feature on. Basically, the article must be useless when found on another website. For this purpose create tools (calculators, whatever) that your articles refer to. In addition, refer articles to each other. Use links! Add pictures, refer to pictures within articles. Put a copyright layer on all pictures on your website! I’ll give you an example: many dishonest webmasters copied articles from my aqua-fish.net and it made me very angry. After integrating the cross-linking algorithm into the core, articles point to each other via defined words. I also started putting copyright layers on all of my images. So when someone makes a copy of article from my website, it refers to other articles on my site. This way my website receives additional incoming links. It’s not the best way to tackle this, but it’s still better than having all articles being stolen without even a single link pointing to the original source. I could report these guys to Google, or sue them, but for now the links are good to have. You can see, therefore, how linking helps you maintain ownership even after someone has stolen your article. If the links remain, any potential visitor will likely find the original website.

The eighth SEO technique I use is the “spread a word” method. Usually this consists of directory submissions and forum posts. Let people discover tools on your website, and let them spread a word about these outstanding tools. It can’t be bad. Even criticism is welcome! Negative advertisement is still advertisement! As I mentioned in this post, the best links come for free, so I never push too hard. I like it when things are natural.

There are some techniques that I don’t use for SEO: bold text, italic text, phrases in the first and last sentences, keyword density factor, meta keywords, spamming on blogs (comments or registering in WP-MU blogs), too many forum signatures, email marketing (this is spam, isn’t it?), and so on.

And it works… the proof is here: web-developers.net was 3rd when I published this article. Further proof: web-developers.net was 9th when I published this article.