ZillionBits-Its about number$ and te<h^0!0gy

There are four major ways to get traffic to your site: search engines, links from other sites, feeds (especially blogs) and advertising. Of those four, a lot of effort is spent trying to get a good ranking in the various search engines, especially Google. Why? Because a good ranking is a sure way to get a lot of traffic, and the #1 spot on the search engine results page (SERP) for a given keyphrase is a prime traffic generator indeed. (Well, assuming anyone’s actually searching for that keyphrase…)

Some readers I’ve talked to have expressed surprise in discovering their own page in the #1 position on a Google SERP. “How is this possible?”, they ask, “when there are no links to my page and it has no PageRank?”

There are two fallacies here. One is that the Google “link:” command shows all the links to a given page. It doesn’t, it only shows a partial list of pages that meet some unknown criteria. A better way to find out who links to your page is to search for your page’s URL while excluding your own site. For example, to find out which pages in Google link to www.memwg.com/blog/adsense I can do this search:

www.memwg.com/blog/adsense -site:memwg.com

There’s all sorts of buzz about blogs lately and yet so many companies are still wondering what to do about it. In fact, there are a tremendous number of business blogs that are not realizing much of their potential visibilty on the web. Why? Because they’re not optimized.

This is very much the same scenario that occurred with web sites in the late nineties. Back then I worked with a company that sold web sites - lots of them. But after getting the site up and running, the traffic didn’t come by itself. So we figured out optimizing for search engines and that was the start of my SEO career. Blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.

With blogs, there exist as many or more optimization opportunities to optimize as with a web site. While most blog software is more search engine friendly out of the box than many web sites, the opportunities for blog optimization are readily available. For our SEO and blog marketing consulting service, we have a very long list blog optimization tactics to employ. For this post, I’ll focus on a short list that can make a difference for any blog.

The competitive filter, which you access from your AdSense management console, is a mechanism that lets you list the URLs of AdWords advertisers whose ads you want to block. Normally you block an entire domain, but you can actually block a specific part or folder on a domain. The details are in the AdSense Filter Guide — be sure you read it to understand how to specify the URLs to filter. Currently, you’re limited to entering 200 URLs for AdSense for content and another 200 for AdSense for search. While this sounds like a lot, it really isn’t if you’re using the filter for its secondary purpose: filtering low-paying ads.

Of course, the filter is called the “competitive ad filter” for a reason. It was created so that AdSense publishers could filter out ads from competitors. It cannot, unfortunately, be used to filter out ads by keyword or topic — you can only do that by adjusting the content of your pages to emphasize a different keyword/topic. But really, there’s no way to keep anyone out short of filtering by the ad destination.

The first obvious step is to find a niche. While it is possible to have a general interest blog, it may not be as profitable as targeting a specific subject (click here to read the logic behind targeted advertising).

Once you settled on a subject you like, its time to set up your blog. Blogger.com is great for beginners. Not only is it free (and free of ads, unlike most free hosting services), it has integrated support for AdSense (more on this later). For now, pick a suitable but catchy name and choose one of the pre-made designs.

Of course, now you have to start making posts to your blog. There are two main types of posts. The most common type of content on blogs seems to be commentary plus a link to the actual news source or website of interest. Then there are original content posts which will have others link to you (much like you do in your commentary posts). Either way, make sure its interesting to have readers coming back.

Now its time to apply for Google’s AdSense program. AdSense is a pay per click program which matches ads to the content of your page. Every time a visitor to your site clicks on one of these links, you receive a small amount of revenue (the minimum advertisers can bid for a link is $0.05, of which you receive a percentage. Many phrases can have bids as high as several dollars per click).