If you have an AdSense account, this latest launch of Google AdSense Referrals 2.0 is something you must look at. In addition to the traditional Google products, there is now a very long and varied list of products that you can include in your Blogs and offer your readers. In contextual ad targeting, the AdSense ads that appear in your Blog may not always be relevant, especially if you do not have a consistent theme in your posts. With AdSense Referrals, you are now able to pick the specific products that you like, and are paid the referral fees. In Blogger.com, it is easy to insert an AdSense for content widget but not a Referral unit. This article will explain how you can fill the “shopping cart”, customize the ad colors, insert the code and have the Referral ads appear just before or after your Blogs posts.
Before we begin, we assume that you already have an AdSense account. If you don't, you can always sign up for a Google AdSense account. AdSense is by far one of the preferred ways of monetizing your Blogs and they have various features which can earn you that extra income and revenue through blogging.
Setting up the Referral ads
1. Country and Language
Login to your AdSense account, click the “AdSense Setup” tab and choose “Referrals”. Somewhere near the top, you will see the default country and language that your Referral ads will be based in. If your readers are mainly from another country or are using another language, change the preferences and click “Show”. Since this is a new feature, some of the languages may see fewer advertisers.
AdSense Product Referrals in Blogger
2. Ad Format
Although you can begin to view the products and add them to the Shopping Cart, it may be wise to set the ad format at this stage. Some advertisers have predetermined ad formats which may not fit into your desired size. Choose the “Ad format” size that you like.
3. Choice of products
It is time to go shopping for the relevant ads. There are three ways you can do that:-
a. Keyword
Enter a keyword that is in line with your theme. You will be shown a list of products that match the keyword (maximum of ten keywords). You can click “Add this keyword to cart.” When you use this option, Google AdSense will rotate the ads to match this keyword and new products will be added automatically without further action at your end.
AdSense Product Referrals in Blogger
b. Category
You can browse by category. View the products. If you find a suitable category for your Blog, you can add the entire category to the Shopping Cart. New products in the category will be automatically rotated to show the highest-paying product ads in your Blog. You can have up to ten categories added into the Shopping Cart.
AdSense Product Referrals in Blogger
c. Products
You can also choose the specific products (a maximum of fifteen) to be added to your ad unit. View the products and click the link. You will be shown the referral fees and the terms. There may be different text ad formats and image ad formats that you can choose from. Where the ad size does not fit into the ad unit format that you have earlier determined, you will see a message “This size not compatible with currently chosen ad format.” Choose the one that fits and the product will appear in your Shopping Cart.
AdSense Product Referrals in Blogger
4. Best performing ads
You can tick the “Pick best performing ads” option to have Google AdSense display ads that they believe will bring you more revenue. Since it is based on Google's contextual targeting and analysis, the ads you chose may not be shown.
5. Advanced Options
Click “Advanced Options” and you will be asked to choose a color combination and a channel. Most of us would like the colors to blend with our Blogs. If that were the case, do not use the “Default Google palette” but choose instead any of the “AdSense palettes.” We shall talk about changing the colors later.
You can specify a custom channel to track the performance of these ads. This is particularly useful if you have several blogs and you want to know how well the ads in each blog have performed. Some may want to try out different ad positioning and assign a tracking channel to each of the ad units to monitor the clicks.
AdSense Product Referrals in Blogger
6. Colors customization
Once you are done, click “Continue” and you will be shown the Referrals code that you can add to your web site. The code looks something like this:-
The parts in red are the color codes. You can change the color values and assign different colors to the Referral ad border, background (bg), link, text or url. You may refer to the list of color codes and values or look at your template to find out what colors have been used for your Blog.
7. Placement of code
To insert the code into the Blog, go to Template -> Page Elements -> Add a Page Element either in your sidebar or post body area, and select HTML/JavaScript. Copy and paste the entire JavaScript code and save.
If you would like to have AdSense Referrals appear in every individual post, between your post title and post body, or between your post body and post footer, you may follow this guide AdSense Code in Blogger Post Body, parse the code and place it into the appropriate part of your template.
Under the current rules, you can place up to three AdSense Referral units and three standard AdSense for content units on a single webpage. Therefore, if you have placed the AdSense Referral code into your template, and there are five posts in your page, the ads will only be shown in the first three posts.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Submit Blog to Search Engines
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims at increasing the volume and improving the quality of traffic to a website from search engine results. Search engines work on different algorithms to analyze the contents and keywords, and present the search results. Google, for instance, assigns page ranks to the sites and sites that rank highly will appear early in the results. Of course, many other factors are considered by search engines, such as relevance, unique content, coding and quality of links. The major search engines know that revealing these factors will only encourage manipulation of the ranking system and have thus been secretive about how the ranking algorithms work.
While no SEO consultant can be absolutely certain about how each search engine views your site, the common agreement is that the more visible your site is on the internet, the higher your ranking will eventually be. Having your site linked to by many other sites and indexed by different search engines increase its exposure and visibility. We have given readers a list of Blog Directories and Feed Directories. In this article, we shall provide a list of search engines where you can submit your website or Blog URLs for Free and have your site or Blog indexed by the search engines.
Website Indexing
Unless you have created a private blog, it is a matter of time that your blog is indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the fastest ways to have your site indexed is to get another site that is already in the search engine listings to link to you. When the search engine crawlers visit that site, they will find your site and index it. We tried this out by linking to our new Blog and it appeared in Google search listings within three hours. Hence, try this method if you do not want to wait for search engines to approve your site submission.
Before we proceed to the list of search engine sites, there are a few points to note:-
1. To check if your site has been indexed by a search engine, enter the full URL into their search query. For some search engines like Microsoft Live Search, enter site: followed by the full URL. If you see your site appearing in the search results, it has been indexed and there is no need to resubmit the site.
2. If your Blog has been linked to by Blog Directories, websites or Blogs, you may see these other sites that mention your Blog appearing first in the search results. More likely than not, they have a higher page rank. Scroll through the remaining search result pages and you will probably find a listing that is solely about your Blog.
3. When submitting your site, you do not need to submit the URL of each individual webpage. Submit only the top-level webpage and for Blogger Blogs, it will be an address like this http://blogname.blogspot.com without the www. before the blogname.
4. You can submit your sitemap to Google and login to Google Webmaster site to know the status of the indexing and view traffic statistics. Also, submit your sitemap to Yahoo! to find out more about the index and links to your site. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.
5. If you add your URL in Yahoo!, it will appear in their other search sites like AlltheWeb and AltaVista as well. Similarly, AOL Search uses the data by Google.
6. Some of the sites send advertisements and newsletters to you in exchange for free submission. If you don't want that, remember to opt out of it. Avoid having your regular email account filled with these mail by creating another free web-based email account just for website submissions.
7. Since search engines have different standards of content, design and technical specifications, submission of your site does not guarantee that it will be included in their database.
List of Search Engines
You may submit your site URL to these search engines for Free. If you lack the time, submit your site to the top few leading search engines.
* Google
* Yahoo! Search
* Microsoft Live Search
* Alexa Web Search
* Baidu (Chinese search engine)
* ExactSeek
* SearchSight
* Scrub the Web
* EntireWeb
* Gigablast
* Exalead
* SearchKing
* whatUseek
* AnooX
* Splat Search
* Walhello
* SearchIt
* email Mozdex
* Jayde
* Infotiger
* Abacho (European search engine)
* Submit-one
* TowerSearch
* HotLaunch
* Shoula
* The-search-site
* Websquash
* Unasked
* eVisum (educational resource)
* DinoSearch
* SearchRamp
* SearchtheWeb
* SearchWarp
* Mixcat
* BestYellow
* Beamed
Website Submission Services
There are many sites on the internet offering free website submission services to search engines. The list of search engines are by and large the same. For a fee, some of them offer to send your URL to more than a hundred search engines. Is it necessary to have your webpage listed in all the smaller search engines? We think that Google, Yahoo! and MSN have cornered such a large share of the market that it is sufficient just to have your website listed there. However, the decision is yours to make. For a start, you may want to use their free services and monitor the traffic.
* FastSubmit
* Submit Express
* AddMe
* Freesubmissionweb
* ineedhits
* Submitshop
* Searchengineoptimising
* AddPro
* Pageranklist
* Freewebsubmission
* Amfibi
* Burf
* Jerkasmarknad
* LocalSubmit
* SrSubmit
We shall update this list every now and then and you may want to bookmark this page. Click the Bookmark button below and revisit this page.
While no SEO consultant can be absolutely certain about how each search engine views your site, the common agreement is that the more visible your site is on the internet, the higher your ranking will eventually be. Having your site linked to by many other sites and indexed by different search engines increase its exposure and visibility. We have given readers a list of Blog Directories and Feed Directories. In this article, we shall provide a list of search engines where you can submit your website or Blog URLs for Free and have your site or Blog indexed by the search engines.
Website Indexing
Unless you have created a private blog, it is a matter of time that your blog is indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the fastest ways to have your site indexed is to get another site that is already in the search engine listings to link to you. When the search engine crawlers visit that site, they will find your site and index it. We tried this out by linking to our new Blog and it appeared in Google search listings within three hours. Hence, try this method if you do not want to wait for search engines to approve your site submission.
Before we proceed to the list of search engine sites, there are a few points to note:-
1. To check if your site has been indexed by a search engine, enter the full URL into their search query. For some search engines like Microsoft Live Search, enter site: followed by the full URL. If you see your site appearing in the search results, it has been indexed and there is no need to resubmit the site.
2. If your Blog has been linked to by Blog Directories, websites or Blogs, you may see these other sites that mention your Blog appearing first in the search results. More likely than not, they have a higher page rank. Scroll through the remaining search result pages and you will probably find a listing that is solely about your Blog.
3. When submitting your site, you do not need to submit the URL of each individual webpage. Submit only the top-level webpage and for Blogger Blogs, it will be an address like this http://blogname.blogspot.com without the www. before the blogname.
4. You can submit your sitemap to Google and login to Google Webmaster site to know the status of the indexing and view traffic statistics. Also, submit your sitemap to Yahoo! to find out more about the index and links to your site. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.
5. If you add your URL in Yahoo!, it will appear in their other search sites like AlltheWeb and AltaVista as well. Similarly, AOL Search uses the data by Google.
6. Some of the sites send advertisements and newsletters to you in exchange for free submission. If you don't want that, remember to opt out of it. Avoid having your regular email account filled with these mail by creating another free web-based email account just for website submissions.
7. Since search engines have different standards of content, design and technical specifications, submission of your site does not guarantee that it will be included in their database.
List of Search Engines
You may submit your site URL to these search engines for Free. If you lack the time, submit your site to the top few leading search engines.
* Yahoo! Search
* Microsoft Live Search
* Alexa Web Search
* Baidu (Chinese search engine)
* ExactSeek
* SearchSight
* Scrub the Web
* EntireWeb
* Gigablast
* Exalead
* SearchKing
* whatUseek
* AnooX
* Splat Search
* Walhello
* SearchIt
* email Mozdex
* Jayde
* Infotiger
* Abacho (European search engine)
* Submit-one
* TowerSearch
* HotLaunch
* Shoula
* The-search-site
* Websquash
* Unasked
* eVisum (educational resource)
* DinoSearch
* SearchRamp
* SearchtheWeb
* SearchWarp
* Mixcat
* BestYellow
* Beamed
Website Submission Services
There are many sites on the internet offering free website submission services to search engines. The list of search engines are by and large the same. For a fee, some of them offer to send your URL to more than a hundred search engines. Is it necessary to have your webpage listed in all the smaller search engines? We think that Google, Yahoo! and MSN have cornered such a large share of the market that it is sufficient just to have your website listed there. However, the decision is yours to make. For a start, you may want to use their free services and monitor the traffic.
* FastSubmit
* Submit Express
* AddMe
* Freesubmissionweb
* ineedhits
* Submitshop
* Searchengineoptimising
* AddPro
* Pageranklist
* Freewebsubmission
* Amfibi
* Burf
* Jerkasmarknad
* LocalSubmit
* SrSubmit
We shall update this list every now and then and you may want to bookmark this page. Click the Bookmark button below and revisit this page.
SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization
SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization
What are search engine optimization tools, webmaster tools, Google page rank checker, SEO tools, and how can these internet tools help to bring more quality traffic to your Blog? There are many free online web tools that webmasters can use to find out more information about their sites. The tools can also alert the webmasters to possible problems search engines may have with the site's template codes and design. Here, we shall, for the benefit of our new bloggers, explain how these webmaster tools might help improve your website's PageRank.
Search Engine Optimization
We define Search Engine Optimization as – a method or process of improving and optimizing the ranking of a website in search engine results.
With millions of pages of search results for any given keyword, webmasters would want to have their website appear among the first couple of search result listings. The higher the position or ranking, the greater the likelihood that internet users will visit your site. This Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) concept is no different from a brick-and-mortar shop where location and visibility affect how many customers will pass by the shop and hopefully drop in for a visit. On the internet, your virtual site deserves a good location and visibility, and SEO consultants believe they know how to achieve that.
Blog Directory and Search Engine Listings
After having published a Blog or website, the first thing to do is to make sure that the information relating to the site is available on the internet. Web Directories, Blog Directories and Search Engines are the internet Yellow Pages. Although the major Search Engines will crawl your website even without any action on your part, it will be much faster if you could proactively provide them your site information. We had written articles on how and where to submit the blog information so as to have your site fully indexed and appear in many places on the internet.
Read these guides and follow the steps outlined:-
1. Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster
2. Submit Blogger Sitemap to Yahoo!
3. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com
4. Submit Blog to Search Engines
5. Submit Blog to Blog Directories
6. Submit RSS Feeds and Pings
7. Blog Traffic Exchange
Free SEO Tools
After you have submitted your website's data to all the search engines and directories, you should be able to find your site somewhere on the internet. If you do a keyword search on your website's topic, you may find many other listings in the search results ahead of yours. These are the sites which have better page ranks and are optimized for the search engines. You can optimize your blog or website too.
To attract business, many SEO sites have put up some of their SEO tools for free. Commercial sites which are serious in wanting to climb up the search ranking will pay the SEO consultants for more value-added services. If you are like us, blogging out of fun and passion, it might be better to use only the free services for a start.
Enter words like - free SEO tools - into the search box and you can see what some of these sites offer.
Enter your search termsSubmit search form
Suggested SEO Tools
Many of the SEO webmaster sites have similar free tools and services. You can try any of them, though the one that we like is iWebTool. In fact, they have a link exchange program which you may want to check out. Among the SEO Tools, the ones we find useful in all these sites are:-
a. Backlink Checker – A list of sites that have linked to your blog or website. PageRank is largely determined by the number and quality of links to your site. Monitor this and you can probably guess what your PageRank ought to be.
b. Broken Link Checker – A look at which of the links in your site are pointing to incorrect or non-existent URLs. Having too many outdated and broken links on your web page may irritate not only the readers but the search spiders. Do this housekeeping once in a while to remove the bad links.
c. Google PageRank Checker – The Google PageRank of your site. You can also download Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar to view the Google PageRanks of all the sites that you visit.
d. Google PageRank Prediction – A future Google PageRank prediction. If you are dying to know, these sites can give you a fair estimate of your future PageRank.
e. HTML Optimizer – A clean up of your HTML source code. Be careful when you apply the suggested changes though. Always good to backup the template before making any modification.
f. Index Checker – Number of pages of your website that are indexed by search engines. If pages are missing from the index, try submitting your sitemap again.
g. Keyword Density Checker – The keyword distribution in your webpage. This will by and large influence the sort of Ads that AdSense will place on your site.
h. Keyword Suggestor – Suggested popular keywords for your website. Bear in mind these keywords when writing or editing your posts.
i. Meta-tags Generator – Configuration of website's meta-tags. Tailor a suitable description and set of keywords to be inserted into the template.
j. Reciprocal Link Checker – A check to see if the partners in your blogrolls or link exchange are linking to you.
k. Spider Simulator – The page contents as seen by a search engine spider. Some may give you a breakdown of the commonly used keywords in your site.
l. Traffic Graphs – A comparison of your site's and other competitor sites' traffic history graphs in Alexa.
m. Website Speed Test – Speed of website page load. If you find the pageload time a little long, take some measures to have a Faster Web Page Load Time.
Basic Tools
Should you want to have a quick look at what some of the SEO tools are about, we have created a few basic search tools over here at our Tips for New Bloggers site.
Yahoo!
To know how Yahoo! sees your site, enter into the search box below your website's URL in full, beginning with http:// For Blogger blogs, you do not have to add a “www.” into the blog URL.
1. Yahoo! Indexed Pages
The results will show you the number and details of the web Pages that are indexed by Yahoo!
2. Yahoo! Backlinks
Enter your site's URL to see the Inlinks or backlinks of your site.
Google
The data in the various search engines are not the same. You can have a look at how your blog is performing in Google search by entering your site URL below.
1. Google Indexed Pages
Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in Google.
2. Google Backlinks
Enter URL after the word link: for details of the backlinks to your site.
Microsoft Live Search
Compared to Google and Yahoo!, MSN spiders may not index as many pages. Nevertheless, if you are curious to know, enter your blog URL into the search boxes below.
1. MSN Indexed Pages
Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in MSN.
2. MSN Backlinks
Enter URL after the word link: to view the backlinks.
Page Rank Checker
This search tool is provided by Prchecker. Enter a URL into the form to view the Google PageRank.
Alexa Rankings
Alexa monitors the web traffic of many top sites. You can compare and view the Alexa traffic graph of your site by entering your site URL into the search box below.
What are search engine optimization tools, webmaster tools, Google page rank checker, SEO tools, and how can these internet tools help to bring more quality traffic to your Blog? There are many free online web tools that webmasters can use to find out more information about their sites. The tools can also alert the webmasters to possible problems search engines may have with the site's template codes and design. Here, we shall, for the benefit of our new bloggers, explain how these webmaster tools might help improve your website's PageRank.
Search Engine Optimization
We define Search Engine Optimization as – a method or process of improving and optimizing the ranking of a website in search engine results.
With millions of pages of search results for any given keyword, webmasters would want to have their website appear among the first couple of search result listings. The higher the position or ranking, the greater the likelihood that internet users will visit your site. This Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) concept is no different from a brick-and-mortar shop where location and visibility affect how many customers will pass by the shop and hopefully drop in for a visit. On the internet, your virtual site deserves a good location and visibility, and SEO consultants believe they know how to achieve that.
Blog Directory and Search Engine Listings
After having published a Blog or website, the first thing to do is to make sure that the information relating to the site is available on the internet. Web Directories, Blog Directories and Search Engines are the internet Yellow Pages. Although the major Search Engines will crawl your website even without any action on your part, it will be much faster if you could proactively provide them your site information. We had written articles on how and where to submit the blog information so as to have your site fully indexed and appear in many places on the internet.
Read these guides and follow the steps outlined:-
1. Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster
2. Submit Blogger Sitemap to Yahoo!
3. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com
4. Submit Blog to Search Engines
5. Submit Blog to Blog Directories
6. Submit RSS Feeds and Pings
7. Blog Traffic Exchange
Free SEO Tools
After you have submitted your website's data to all the search engines and directories, you should be able to find your site somewhere on the internet. If you do a keyword search on your website's topic, you may find many other listings in the search results ahead of yours. These are the sites which have better page ranks and are optimized for the search engines. You can optimize your blog or website too.
To attract business, many SEO sites have put up some of their SEO tools for free. Commercial sites which are serious in wanting to climb up the search ranking will pay the SEO consultants for more value-added services. If you are like us, blogging out of fun and passion, it might be better to use only the free services for a start.
Enter words like - free SEO tools - into the search box and you can see what some of these sites offer.
Enter your search termsSubmit search form
Suggested SEO Tools
Many of the SEO webmaster sites have similar free tools and services. You can try any of them, though the one that we like is iWebTool. In fact, they have a link exchange program which you may want to check out. Among the SEO Tools, the ones we find useful in all these sites are:-
a. Backlink Checker – A list of sites that have linked to your blog or website. PageRank is largely determined by the number and quality of links to your site. Monitor this and you can probably guess what your PageRank ought to be.
b. Broken Link Checker – A look at which of the links in your site are pointing to incorrect or non-existent URLs. Having too many outdated and broken links on your web page may irritate not only the readers but the search spiders. Do this housekeeping once in a while to remove the bad links.
c. Google PageRank Checker – The Google PageRank of your site. You can also download Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar to view the Google PageRanks of all the sites that you visit.
d. Google PageRank Prediction – A future Google PageRank prediction. If you are dying to know, these sites can give you a fair estimate of your future PageRank.
e. HTML Optimizer – A clean up of your HTML source code. Be careful when you apply the suggested changes though. Always good to backup the template before making any modification.
f. Index Checker – Number of pages of your website that are indexed by search engines. If pages are missing from the index, try submitting your sitemap again.
g. Keyword Density Checker – The keyword distribution in your webpage. This will by and large influence the sort of Ads that AdSense will place on your site.
h. Keyword Suggestor – Suggested popular keywords for your website. Bear in mind these keywords when writing or editing your posts.
i. Meta-tags Generator – Configuration of website's meta-tags. Tailor a suitable description and set of keywords to be inserted into the template.
j. Reciprocal Link Checker – A check to see if the partners in your blogrolls or link exchange are linking to you.
k. Spider Simulator – The page contents as seen by a search engine spider. Some may give you a breakdown of the commonly used keywords in your site.
l. Traffic Graphs – A comparison of your site's and other competitor sites' traffic history graphs in Alexa.
m. Website Speed Test – Speed of website page load. If you find the pageload time a little long, take some measures to have a Faster Web Page Load Time.
Basic Tools
Should you want to have a quick look at what some of the SEO tools are about, we have created a few basic search tools over here at our Tips for New Bloggers site.
Yahoo!
To know how Yahoo! sees your site, enter into the search box below your website's URL in full, beginning with http:// For Blogger blogs, you do not have to add a “www.” into the blog URL.
1. Yahoo! Indexed Pages
The results will show you the number and details of the web Pages that are indexed by Yahoo!
2. Yahoo! Backlinks
Enter your site's URL to see the Inlinks or backlinks of your site.
The data in the various search engines are not the same. You can have a look at how your blog is performing in Google search by entering your site URL below.
1. Google Indexed Pages
Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in Google.
2. Google Backlinks
Enter URL after the word link: for details of the backlinks to your site.
Microsoft Live Search
Compared to Google and Yahoo!, MSN spiders may not index as many pages. Nevertheless, if you are curious to know, enter your blog URL into the search boxes below.
1. MSN Indexed Pages
Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in MSN.
2. MSN Backlinks
Enter URL after the word link: to view the backlinks.
Page Rank Checker
This search tool is provided by Prchecker. Enter a URL into the form to view the Google PageRank.
Alexa Rankings
Alexa monitors the web traffic of many top sites. You can compare and view the Alexa traffic graph of your site by entering your site URL into the search box below.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)