Optimising your site for the Big 3: Adsense, Digg and Google/Yahoo
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
A lot of websites talk about optimising your pages for Google (to gain as many visitors for free as possible). Some others talk about optimising it for Adsense (to get those visitors to click as much as possible in your adds and make as much money as possible).
But I am going to discuss here how to optimise your site for Digg, Google / Yahoo AND Adsense. Why ? Very simple, because they are complimentary, and in the long run your site will be better off working with all of them in mind.
I am going to assume that the objective of your site is to get your voice out to as many people as possible and to get paid for it as much as possible.
Traditionally, you would optimise the site for Google Search, so you get as many visitors from the Search Engines as possible. That would mean using:
- Title and keywords in the metatags.
- In-URL keywords.
- A good title that includes all your keywords (that means, a boring title)
- All this is intented to optimise it for machines, so repeating words and making it boring.
As a second step, some people would also optimise it for Adsense (once they are here, let's make sure they click on adds that pay enough). Again, this means optimising for machines, and involves:
- Looking for high-paying keywords.
- Using those keywords in the title and the text of the pages.
- Mixing the adds with the text, and annoying visitors with very in-your-face adds.
But now we have a new tool: Digg. The difference with the others is that digg:
- Is made of human beings, not robots.
- It has a very short live.
As an example, let's see here the effect of having one story in the front page of Digg.com:
As you can see, it is a very dramatic increase, that fades immediately.
Let's compare this with a "Google effect", when a page gets better positions in Google over time:
The ideal situation would be then to benefit from the 3 of them at the same time. This can be achieved if we do as follows:
- Create great content (no surprises here ...)
- Write for humans. The title has to be catchy and a good summary of the content.
- The first paragraph has to have a lot of information already.
- Include only one or two keywords maximum in the title and first paragraph, to avoid alienating humans and still get robots to index it with those keywords. In order to find those keywords, we have to look for words that generate a lot of traffic (my favorite resource here is Wordtracker) AND also pay a lot per click (my favourite resource here is Keyword Country)
- We send the story to Digg (my experience says best time is Wednesdays at about 09:00 USA Pacific Time)
- We ask a few of our friends to vote for it ... if we don't get enough votes in the first hour, it will disappear forever.
- We pray ?? :)
Good luck, Hope you found this article interesting. If you did, please vote for all my stories at Digg.
But I am going to discuss here how to optimise your site for Digg, Google / Yahoo AND Adsense. Why ? Very simple, because they are complimentary, and in the long run your site will be better off working with all of them in mind.
I am going to assume that the objective of your site is to get your voice out to as many people as possible and to get paid for it as much as possible.
Traditionally, you would optimise the site for Google Search, so you get as many visitors from the Search Engines as possible. That would mean using:
- Title and keywords in the metatags.
- In-URL keywords.
- A good title that includes all your keywords (that means, a boring title)
- All this is intented to optimise it for machines, so repeating words and making it boring.
As a second step, some people would also optimise it for Adsense (once they are here, let's make sure they click on adds that pay enough). Again, this means optimising for machines, and involves:
- Looking for high-paying keywords.
- Using those keywords in the title and the text of the pages.
- Mixing the adds with the text, and annoying visitors with very in-your-face adds.
But now we have a new tool: Digg. The difference with the others is that digg:
- Is made of human beings, not robots.
- It has a very short live.
As an example, let's see here the effect of having one story in the front page of Digg.com:
As you can see, it is a very dramatic increase, that fades immediately.
Let's compare this with a "Google effect", when a page gets better positions in Google over time:
The ideal situation would be then to benefit from the 3 of them at the same time. This can be achieved if we do as follows:
- Create great content (no surprises here ...)
- Write for humans. The title has to be catchy and a good summary of the content.
- The first paragraph has to have a lot of information already.
- Include only one or two keywords maximum in the title and first paragraph, to avoid alienating humans and still get robots to index it with those keywords. In order to find those keywords, we have to look for words that generate a lot of traffic (my favorite resource here is Wordtracker) AND also pay a lot per click (my favourite resource here is Keyword Country)
- We send the story to Digg (my experience says best time is Wednesdays at about 09:00 USA Pacific Time)
- We ask a few of our friends to vote for it ... if we don't get enough votes in the first hour, it will disappear forever.
- We pray ?? :)
Good luck, Hope you found this article interesting. If you did, please vote for all my stories at Digg.
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1 Comments:
** Comment: **
can also give http://www.keywordspy.com a try
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