EzSEO Newsletter # 119
April 23, 2006 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 119
Andy Williams ez SEO
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IMPORTANT: You are receiving this Newsletter because you signed up for it. If you no longer wish to receive it, refer to the bottom of this newsletter for the removal link.
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This week:
1. Fr.ee Keyword Tool
2. Republishing articles from my newsletter.
3. Profitable Websites Built from Directory Articles?
4. Redirecting affiliate links (part II)
5. Quit Your Day Job
6. Update on my site move
7. Other Stuff.
Hi again.
Today I have a couple of mini-reviews, news of a new experiment I am doing, plus updates on my domain move. Hope you enjoy it.
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1. Fr.ee Keyword Tool
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For as long as I can remember, Good Keywords has been a useful tool for keyword brainstorming. I use it in my preliminary research before heading off to Wordtracker to build my keyword list. It’s not as good as Wordtracker for coming up with keywords because of its reliance largely on the Overture suggestion tool, but it has other very useful features.
Firstly there is an excellent misspelling feature. Type in a word, and Good Keyword can show you possible mispellings. What I do here is paste these mispellings into Wordtracker to find even more phrases. Its amazing how many more keyword phrases you have when you include these.
This tool also has a webpage explorer. It allows you to type in a URL and get back some keyword data on that page. This is quite useful when analyzing your competition. You can see at a glance what one and two word phrases they are targeting on the page.
There are other features too, including a keyword phrase builder, keyword organiser, and a site & link popularity feature.
I was checking on the site & link popularity for my new ezseonews.com site (redirected from my old ez-search-engine-optimization.com site), and saw that my Alexa rating for the site was now 46,968. That’s not bad for a new site, and reminded me of the article I wrote a few newsletters ago where my old site was listed in Alexa as a “mover & shaker” in the downward list. In part 6 of this newsletter I’ll update you on how the move has gone so far, and what sort of traffic and rankings I am now getting.
If you have not yet got a copy of Good Keywords, it is well worth a look, and for a fr-ee program, it is very useful.
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2. Republishing articles from my newsletter
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I get asked quite a lot for permission to reprint parts of my newsletter on websites or ezines. You must ask permission to reprint any part of my newsletter on your site or publication.
In general, I don’t mind parts being reprinted as long as a resource box is included with an active link back to my site. I will provide the resource box on request.
The only parts of my newsletter that I do not want published elsewhere are the miniseries articles.
If you want to reprint any part of my newsletter on your own site, just drop me an email. Include the content you want to republish, and the site or ezine where you want to publish it.
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3. Profitable Websites Built from Directory Articles?
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Regular readers will know that I don’t often publish articles on my own sites from article directories. I do use them in autoresponder sequences and other areas of my business though. However, after talking with some other marketers, a lot of people do seem to be making money creating sites around articles found at article directories.
I am not convinced, so have decided to try an experiment. I want to create a website based mostly on fre-ely available articles from article sites, and monitor how much Adsense income that website generates. I will of course keep you informed of its progress.
In preparation for my experiment, I bought two pieces of software that can collect articles from article directories. The first was Article Equalizer. While initially it appeared (from sales letter) I could collect articles based on keywords from the directories, it seems this functionality is not as good as the sales letter makes you think, so am reserving my judgement on that tool, and may even get a refund on this one.
When I saw the shortcomings of Article Equalizer, I bought another tool called Article Miner. This one was actually my first choice, but the price put me off. Article Equalizer is $97, Article Miner is $147. However, add on the tax that is collected when you order Article Equalizer and that price goes up over $110. There is no tax to pay on Article Miner. The difference in price does not then seem so big.
Now. There is a reason I am telling you about this now, and not waiting for my results. Article Miner is being withdrawn from sale on the 1st May. I have talked with the author, and it will continue to be updated for the foreseeable future. If this is the sort of tool you would find useful, you need to get it in the next week before it is gone.
OK, so what does Article Miner do?
Well, the first thing to note is that dynamically searching Article Directories is against the TOS of many directories, so Article Miner actually stores the article database on your computer. This speeds up searches, and means the author can just send you an new update database file to add to your existing database. This is where the updates come in, and why updates are important. With more than 300,000 articles in the database and growing, the download size of this tool is huge (over 800MB).
Article Miner is a very versatile tool that can help you add articles to your site. More importantly than that, it can do so dynamically. That’s right. You select the articles you want published on your site, and specify a publishing schedule.
This dynamic growth will grow your website slowly over time from the articles you have specified – something you should be doing on all your sites.
What I find very exciting about Article Miner is the ability to import your own articles into the database. That means you can use the web-building features with your own content, instead of, or as well as the articles from the directories.
Other impressive features include the RSS functionality of Article Miner. It can easily create RSS feeds for your site, and has a feature for RSS2Blog users.
The software is fantastic. My only reservation is whether a site built on directory articles can do well and make a profit. The next few months will give me the answer.
To see a demo site built 100% with Article Miner, visit the authors demo site at:
This site looks good and was created totally within Article Miner.
For more information on this innovative tool, visit the Article Miner Site.
And remember, it will be withdrawn from sale on 1st May.
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4. Redirecting affiliate links (part II)
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This section is really just an update from the last newsletter where I suggested using server side redirects to hide affiliate links from ad-blockers. I got an email from one subscriber who offered further advice. Here it is:
“As you point out in issue #74, modifying the .htaccess file when adding or changing links can cause problems. Also, the file is often not visible in an FTP client, and the host may not want (or allow) users to make changes.
Another way to do it, as I’m sure you know, is to create a folder in the root directory and have links redirect to the merchant sites via blank pages in this folder. To keep search engines from indexing the folder, it can be added to the robots.txt file. “.
If you want to explore this option, I highly recommend you read the Clickbank FAQs.
They talk about ways to hide your links, and the methods described there can be applied to any affiliate program.
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5. Quit Your Day Job
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I am sure many of you have received promotions from various marketers on an eBook by Super Affiliate Jeremy Palmer who made over one million dollars in affiliate commissions last year.
I have been asked my opinion on this book by several subscribers, and because I am always open to learning new things from those who are more successful than myself, I took the plunge and bought it.
Firstly, the book is 141 pages in length (but a lot of those pages are short paragraphs). It takes you through the complete process of researching, and then building a site. Particular emphasis is given to keyword research, and Jeremy uses mainly fr-ee tools when he does this (although I think he uses Wordtracker too).
While a lot of the information is not new to me, I did like the fact that he shows you a couple of his sites, and talks about different types of sites you can build.
His section on planning pages is very good, and shows how important it is to lay a good foundation for every page you build by careful selection of keywords and themeing.
He discusses how to create landing pages that sell, and this is perhaps where super affiliates differentiate themselves from the ordinary affiliates. If you can master landing pages, and get them to convert visitors into following your call to action, you are at a distinct advantage.
The book ends with traffic generation techniques. Here, Jeremy shows you how he gets traffic to his sites.
The book is good, but for those with a good knowledge of SEO and affiliate marketing, I think you might be a bit disappointed that there isn’t a section called “Secrets that make me a super affiliate”, or some such section that shares knowledge not found elsewhere.
So, do I recommend it? Well, I would recommend this book to beginners who want to learn the ropes. For those with a little more experience, I don’t think this book offers the advanced tips and techniques that you might be hoping for.
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6. Update on my site move
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A quick update on my site move. In the last few weeks, I moved a hyphenated domain to an unhyphenated one. You can go back and read how I did this in the last few newsletters if you missed it.
Why did I do this? Well my old hyphenated domain lost nearly all of its rankings, and my suspicions were that the hyphens in the domain name may be part of the reason. I created a new domain, and did a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one.
So, what has happened?
Well, earlier in the newsletter I mentioned that the new site was now listed with an Alexa ranking of 46,968. I don’t pay too much attention to this figure, but it is nice that it has climbed into the top 50,000.
Traffic to the new site is now at the same level as my old hyphenated site use to get prior to my ranking loss.
Google has not yet indexed all of the new pages, but Yahoo and MSN have taken up the site as well. My old hyphenated site only ever had 2 pages in Yahoo, whereas now there are 14. While it still has a long way to go, I am hopeful Yahoo will continue to index the site, and I’ll happily receive any traffic it sends my way.
I have also noticed more traffic from MSN than the old site got. This is good news, and checking a few of my pages at MSN, my rankings are quite good.
A good thing is that there was no sandbox on the new site. Maybe that is because it was a 301 redirect from an established site, or maybe the Google Sandbox does not really exist. I wont go into that here, I am sure you have your own opinions.
OK, something unusual. In the last newsletter, I mentioned that my ranking for the term “cb accountant review” (search without quotes) was #1 on Google. This is where my old hyphenated domain ranked for this term before I lost my rankings. So it appears that my new page ranking has replaced the old one.
One eagle-eyed subscriber pointed out that my old hyphenated domain was sitting at #3 in Google for that term, and wondered why if hyphenated domains were penalised.
Well, I obviously don’t know for sure, but my thoughts on this are that Google is ranking my new page, and applying that ranking to the #3 URL. Why do I think that? Well, Google cannot be ranking the page found at the URL pointed to by the URL in position 3. It’s impossible.
How do I know? Well that’s easy. The webpage related to the link seen in position 3 does not, and has never existed. This URL is a redirected URL, and when you click on it, you are redirected to the new page on the new domain. The Google cache has not been updated since March 6th for that #3 URL purely because Google cannot access the page. Google, like everyone else are being redirected to the new page on the new domain. So, my feeling is that Google is actually ranking this redirect URL as if it was the new web page on the new site. Confused?
That is a short update on my domain move. It was not nearly as painful as I thought it would be, and I now have a non-hyphenated domain name and most of my old rankings back.
If you have time, I would love it if you could write a small review (even one sentence would do) of my ezseonews.com website. You can do this on the Alexa site. Just look at the bottom of this page for “User Reviews for ezseonews.com”
Thanks in advance!
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7. Other Stuff
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I have taken most of this last week off, and so have a lot to catch up on starting tomorrow. Niche Blueprints are due out tomorrow (or Tuesday at the latest), and I have a couple of great niches for you.
Also, all KRA owners can expect news of the v2 upgrade, as well as v2 being officially released. I hope to release it this week if possible, and the price will be increased to $97 to reflect the new features. All v1 customers will get the upgrade for fr-ee, so if you have been on the fence over whether to buy it, $30 is a good incentive.
Finally, I have a favour to ask. If you know of any natural remedies (or foods) that help reduce blood pressure, please let me know. My doctor is sending me for a lot of tests before possibly putting me on blood pressure medication, and I don’t want that. I also don’t want to be buying natural products for the rest of my life, so I want to have a list of foods that can help reduce it. I have the usual things covered like more exercise, less caffeine, less alcohol, and less tobacco (I do like a nice Cuban cigar). Any ideas? I much prefer a natural diet than taking any form of tablet.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ezseonews.com/archives
Have a great week!
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The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2006 Andrew Williams. If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.
This newsletter disclaims all responsibility for the advertising copy or the product advertised. You cannot rely on the fact that the newsletter has examined the product or recommends or endorses the product, unless it clearly says that it has, when you make your decision whether or not to purchase the product or interact with the advertiser. You are advised to do your own investigation before buying. Additionally, this newsletter may accept articles that we do not write or investigate the accuracy of and for which we may receive direct or indirect benefit or compensation. We specifically disclaim any responsibility for the content of such copy.
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