The logic behind this is very simple. People tend to shy away from pages that have too much paid ads, as too much paid ads displayed suggest a spammy site.

Since users and Google alike do not like too much paid links on a site, what you should be conscious of as a publisher is to walk the fine line between monetizing your site and having it be considered as nothing more than a haven of paid links with nothing more substantial to offer. You can do this by being strategic in the placement of ads so as to minimize the use of ads as much as possible, yet ensuring that they get maximum exposure. You should also at least put some effort into making sure that the ads harmonize with the page’s look, so that even as they stand out enough to draw the eye (and clicks), they won’t end up and eyesore.

In the end, whether you have Adsense on your site, or use another ad service, following the above advice will help you in the long run.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

One option that is increasingly becoming popular today is to hire an SEO copywriting service. There are many entities offering this service – you only have to take your pick among them. There are some advantages to taking on the services of an external company to help you with your writing. Perhaps the main one is that you can rest assured that you will have fresh and high quality content to publish on a regular basis. You have to bear in mind that these services employ professional copywriters who are highly experienced in writing copy for the Web. This means that you do not even have to worry about the relevance of your content (for your human audience) and that you can also rest assured that the search engines will be happy.

Hiring an SEO copywriting service need not be a difficult task even with all the choices out there. Just make sure that you dig a little deeper into the reputation of the company and the ask to see samples of actual work that they have done. The best news yet – you can avail of these services at very affordable prices!

If you are struggling with your writing, take the time to consider getting some help.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

It’s a great list and I would have to commend the guest blogger for coming up with such list. Going through the 100 tips for promoting a new blog though might be too much a task, so I picked up 10 of this tips which I’ve proven to work based on my recent experience with my new blog on ebooks and ereaders, as well as with my other blogging activities.

So, here goes 10 blog promotion tips that actually work:

1. Write a list of over 100+ resources or ideas – You might think 100+ resources list type of post is daunting and requires too much hard work, why can it be just 10+, 20+, or 30+? Do readers actually go through that 100 items?  Probably not. But 10+ list types are very common today. So if  you have a new blog and you want your list post to stand out, try to make the number of items up to 100+ or even more. You’ll get more attention by doing so and will improve your chances of getting at the front page of Digg.

2. Create a Facebook Fan Page – Nevermind what people say about creating a fan page for blogs. Go ahead and create your own Facebook page. It’s a free world, nobody is stopping you from doing so. But make sure that when you’ve created the Facebook fan page that you promote it properly on your Facebook profile so that your Facebook friends will actually know about it. Then let the power of word-of-mouth advertising do it’s wonders.

3. Connect with Other Bloggers – It doesn’t matter how you do this task. You can connect with bloggers through so many social media ways – follow bloggers on Twitter, Connect with them on Facebook,  Add their site to your Blogroll, etc. The thing is, this old-age habit still works and help you promote your new blog.

4.Search Engine Optimization – Another old trick that still works, no matter what people say that this trick may no longer anymore. The fact is SEO is still important if you want to promote your new blog.

5. ReTweet, ReTweet and ReTweet your Blog Posts – Spammy or not ReTweeting your individual blog posts is still the best way of promoting your new blog. Based on my recent experience with my new blog, this trick actually can make wonders in making your blog known. It helped one of my blog posts got into the Techmeme index which resulted in instant increase in page views – which in turn game me a good AdSense earnings. All in just a couple of days.

5+1. Sit back, relax and wait for the fruits of your labor to reap its rewards. If you are not satisfied with the rewards you’ve gained, go back to step 1 to 5 and find other tips from the DBT posts.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Google’s Official Webmaster blog has put up a post about moving your site from one domain to another, making sure to mention that if the IP address is changing, there is a caveat which they talk about in a search engine optimization post they wrote a while back.

Here are two of the half dozen points they give:

Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

They also provide some other advice, which could be listed as interesting or helpful, but most of it is specific to watching Google do its magic, and making sure that you track the process and notify them of any issues.

It is an interesting post, but I feel that Google could have gone into more detail about what is happening behind the scenes with Google. Like with one point they mention rolling out a domain and design/code change as two different steps to help users, but what do search engines think when they come to a site that has changed both domain and code?

I currently receive twenty-five dollars each time someone purchases the book through one of the banners I have up. So far, I have earned nearly one hundred dollars from sales of the book, and while that’s not an amazing amount of money, I am very happy to see people purchasing the resource.

Near the end of November, the SEO Book was updated to include more up to date information on what is going on with search engines, search engine optimization, and blogging.

I highly recommend purchasing the SEO Book if you haven’t already. The only reason I promote it, is because I own a copy. It is $79 and comes with a 90 day, money back guarantee. As new updates are released, you can download the newer versions, so that you always keep up to date on the best search engine optimization advice in the industry.

I have no doubt that any blogger can learn at least a thing or two from this book.

I told him that I would take a look at it, and while my speciality isn’t really search engines, I did notice a few things right off the bat.

Code

Positioning
One of the first things I noticed about the xhtml generated by the theme used at Celebrity Cowboy is that the blogroll is near the top of the page, with more than twenty items linking out to other sites. While this is only on the front page of the site now, it wasn’t always like this and could have lead to a black mark for the site.

Then there is the content, and then the list of internal links to each one of the more than two dozen categories. Could Google be penalizing the site for having so many outbound links at the top of the page of code, and so many links near the bottom? Could they see this as an attempt to effect search engine rankings by stuffing links in a site?

Things like this have happened before and Google has always been harsh on such things. The flip side though is that all of these links are relevant. Google doesn’t penalize for relevant links, do they?

With Google’s war against paid links, I would be surprised if a few sites got caught in the crossfire, and with these links being site-wide, Google may have mistaken them as paid links.

No doubt they would like sites to make sure to no-follow their blogrolls and other external links that aren’t part of the normal daily content, despite being relative.

Validation
The theme that Celebrity Cowboy is using doesn’t validate. Google has proved time and time again that if you don’t work hard on making your code valid, you can cause yourself to drop in the rankings, and even sometimes to be marked as a “bad” site.

Sometimes sites get listed on stopbadware.org just because their JavaScript doesn’t work correctly, or advertising doesn’t load properly. I have seen this happen to more than a few sites.

Fixing up as many validation issues as possible, could help remove the penalty placed on the site, as Google’s indexing bots might then be able to index the content more efficiently, and without error.

One of the things I first noticed was that there is an ID used more than once, something that probably doesn’t effect the Google search bots, but something that is not correct in xhtml. Classes should be used for repeating items, not ID’s.

Correcting such things should also improve how various browsers render the site, which could have the side effect of increasing traffic, page views, and even links to the blog.

Just Plain Strange
There was one more thing about the coding of the site that really got me scratching my head. It seems that the header image is displayed via CSS, and so rather than showing an image with the proper hyperlink code around it, the coder chose to use JavaScript to make the div that the header is shown thanks to, into a clickable item that uses location.href to bring the visitor back to the index page.

To me this seems like a very bad way to do this effect, and probably not one that Google looks highly on.

Content

One issue that Google has with many sites, especially celebrity sites is “thin content”. They constantly adjust rankings based on this issue. So many articles on Celebrity Cowboy have less than one hundred words, and this can make Google cranky.

An example of a post that has really thin content is the George Clooney Reacts to Nicole Kidman’s Pregnancy post. There are less than two dozen words here, and an image. Surely the writer could give a few more points about both George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, and older actresses being pregnant.

I suggest increasing the number of articles that include over a one hundred words, reducing blockquotes from other sites, lists of external links, and other content which doesn’t increase the usefulness of Celebrity Cowboy.

There should be at least one hundred words of fresh, original content in as many articles as possible.

This is made worse when you remove information around a single post. Remove images, external links, advertisements, repeated content like the popular articles list, and about text, and you are left with very little actual content for Google to sift through, with a very high amount of code.

Another way of reducing this thin content issue, on the front page, and each subsequent page and archive area is to increase the amount of stories shown per page, and while this might not be as important on the front page, it is definitely an issue on other pages, and archive areas where only summaries are shown.

There is a plug-in for WordPress that allows you to change how many posts are shown depending on where the user is on the site. I would suggest enacting this plug-in, and increasing each page to between fifteen and twenty-five posts. While this will make pages longer, it will mean more content per page for Google to see, and the increase in code and loading times should be negligible.

Comments
Another suggestion on how to help your blog would be to find a way to increase user participation in the form of comments. You could highlight the person who has commented the most, or feature the best comment of the week. The cost would be an outbound link, but the reward could be more comments, which can help keep a post fresh in the eyes of search engines, and contribute to the content indexed on the page.

I have actually ranked fairly high for a keyword that I didn’t write, but instead it was because a person commented and Google saw it.

Links

Just like the “thin content” penalty that Celebrity Cowboy may be getting, another issue might be the sheer number of links on each and every page. Also, in talking to the owner of the site, it seems that at one point they were both selling text link advertisements and promoting unrelated websites, neither of which Google looks very kindly on.

Content Scrapers

We all know what it means to deal with spam blogs, but it looks like Celebrity Cowboy has been targeted hard. A search on the popular search engines for specific titles show some very interesting results. It seems that Google has basically given in to content scrapers in this case, and Celebrity Cowboy is nowhere to be seen.

Something that might help identify content scrapers is to make sure you use plugins for WordPress that allow you to put a copyright notice before the content only in RSS. Also, Feedburner should list people using your content for bad things. Then it is just a matter of “nicely” asking them to stop or using htaccess to block their server’s IP address from even seeing the feed.

A good example of what is happening in regards to the content scrapers is when you take an article, with a unique title and search for it on Google.

You will see a the post that was made on Celebrity Cowboy about Constantine Maroulis showing up on a content scraper site, before Celebrity Cowboy, where it was originally written. This unfortunately seems to be happening on nearly every post.

Images

One of the things I noticed on a quick view of the code being generated is that on each image and embedded item in the content, there is extra style being added to remove padding, margins and borders. This is only beefing up the amount of code that Google sees, and contributing to the “thin content” problem I mentioned earlier.

This is most likely being added thanks to the WYSIWYG editor built into WordPress.

Advertising

Recently, there was a big issue with sites selling text link advertisements, and Google took steps to persuade people to stop selling such links, and while Celebrity Cowboy no longer has paid text links on the site, Google may not have fully restored the site in their search engine rankings.

I haven’t heard of anyone else really having such issues, in fact, most people that saw their PageRank drop due to a penalty for selling links, didn’t notice any shift in their search engine results.

Context

When a site changes both in design and server, which Celebrity Cowboy has, I am sure that Google “raises and eyebrow”. Google, or at least the program that indexes our blogs probably asks itself, “has the site been sold, or changed so much that we should re-index it? Is it really the same site we have come to know and love, or should we put it in the sandbox for a while?”

Surely, with all the changes that Google has seen happen to the site, it isn’t going to carry on without giving it an extra dose of scrutiny. Unfortunately, if there was some extra weight behind the site in the past, it may have lost this through changing IP addresses. I haven’t heard of this happening before, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t a possibility.

Google has done some strange things in the past, and Celebrity Cowboy isn’t the only example of something like this happening. You could be doing everything right for a long period of time, yet something changes with Google, and you are pushed so far down the rankings, that you almost have to start again with a new site.

Steps Already Taken

Over on Celebrity Cowboy, they have been trying very hard to take every step they can think of to rectify their search engine problem, and here are just a few that were mentioned to me:

1. Changed the blogroll to only show up on the front page
2. Show categories in the right column after the content
3. Only show categories with at least 5 posts
4. Removed all text link ads
5. Removed all unrelated, self-owned cross promotion
6. Cleaned up theme code to remove unnecessary tags
7. Worked on building more links within the celebrity niche

It seems like many steps have been taken, but the search engines, especially Google, haven’t changed their view towards Celebrity Cowboy. Could it be a waiting game now, as the last major change was changing servers in the middle of November 2007? I doubt it. I am positive that there needs to be more work done on the site in order for the search engine penalty to be removed.

Suggestion Rundown

• Get your code to validate
• Increase content per post
• Promote people that comment
• Decrease outbound links
• Fight content scrapers
• Deal with garbage code being added to posts
• Nofollow all links that are not in your content, or part of your own site

There is no reason why Google would prefer content scrapers over the original content providers, and I hope this is just an error on their part that they will eventually fix, but the reality is that their mistakes effect bloggers and business owners, and if they don’t get better at providing helpful, valuable, and correct search results, people will eventually move somewhere that does.

For Celebrity Cowboy, and other sites that have been similarly effected, I know this can be very frustrating, but the best thing you can do is complain loudly, and hope that the Internet backs you up in your fight to be properly considered in the major search engines.

Hopefully, this will change soon and that the tips I have listed will help enough to at least be ranked higher than the scrapers.

Topical updates include:

• Google PageRank
• Google Supplemental Results
• Google Filtering & Google Search Result Re-ranking
• Ranking Search Results by Re-ranking the Results Based on Local Inter-Connectivity
• Human Review & Query Deserves Freshness
• Universal & Personalized Search
• Google Webmaster Central
• Google AdSense/AdWords
• Google Data Factoids
• Yahoo!/Microsoft Search Changes
• Search Analytics
• Nofollow & Internal Site Architecture
• Robots.txt & Meta Robots Directives
• Eye Tracking of Search Results
• Noteworthy PPC Changes at Smaller Portals
• Blogging
• Link Building Tips: Using PPC to Drive Links
• New SEO Tools
• Additional Reading Resources

So if you haven’t spent the money to buy Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, now is the time. The best $79 you can spend if you want to really dive into understanding search engines, and growing your blog or website.

Or how about when you go to a blog that shows only the title, and the first few sentences, and asks you to click read more on every single post? Feels like you have to jump through hoops just to read their content.

The choice to only show summaries or full posts on your blog can be quite difficult, but each has its advantages and disadvantages. I try to have the best of both worlds.

The Decision

One of the things that I have done here at Xfep is to make sure posts on the front page show the full post, and after they transition to other pages, I only show a summary. I did this for a few reasons, including search engine optimization, and better presentation of my previous work.

People have questioned me about this practice, as I do it on all my blogs.

Why don’t I make all the pages show full content? Well, with having full posts on every page, you begin to delay page loads, and making people wait is a bad idea. Also, most people don’t read past a few paragraphs unless they really enjoy the content.

There are also search engine benefits to limiting your duplicate content as much as possible. If I wanted even more search engine optimization benefits, I wouldn’t show any full articles, except on the single article’s own page.

Doing this has some negatives though, as using a system like mine means that readers are interrupted during their read of an article. They must perform an action to continue to the end of the post, and this turns some people off. Also, we come back to the waiting issue once again, as when people do find the article they want to read, they have to wait for that full page to load.

I find though that the positive aspects of the system that I use outweighs the negatives.

The Steps

If you want to do what I have done, and automate the whole process, I can show you how I do it. It might not be the best way, but it works for me. Please feel free to give me tips or tricks you might have, if you know a better way.

I will assume you are using WordPress to publish your blog. I am sure other systems can do something similar, but this will show how to make pages two to infinity show partial posts, while the main page shows full articles.

Once logged into your WordPress administration panel, go to Presentations and then Theme Editor.

Over in the right hand side, you will see a list of files. We will want to edit the Main Index Template, also known as index.php.

If you are unable to edit the file inside the WordPress administration panel. You will have to FTP into your hosting space and download the index.php file from your theme’s directory.

In this file we are looking for the code that allows us to show the post content.

The line should look something like:
<?php the_content("Continue reading →"); ?>

We want to change this so that we test to see where we are, and that will determine how the content is displayed.

The below basically says that if we are on the home page, page one, the search page, single page, or content page, we should display the full content, otherwise, we should show an except.

<? if (is_home() && (!$paged || $paged == 1) || is_search() || is_single() || is_page()): ?>
<?php the_content("Continue reading →"); ?>
<? else: ?>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<? endif; ?>

Once you update the file with the new code, replacing the old one line content code, your first page should show full articles, while every other page should show only excepts. A great way to boost the search engine optimization of your site, and display teasers to your posts in a quick loading fashion.