EzSEO Newsletter # 144

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Andy Williams

“Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”

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This week:

1. allinwhat? Part III.

2. Matt Cutts Site Reviews

3. CSS Mini-series Part I

4. November Niche Blueprint Released

5. Site Build It! Video Tour

Hi again.

After last weeks newsletter I received over a hundred requests for a CSS mini-course. Thanks for all of your emails, and even suggestions on what to cover in the course.

I’ll be starting the CSS mini-course today, and it is likely to run for several weeks as I’ll show you not only how to use CSS for handling fonts and colours across your site, but also for page layouts (like my ezseonews.com site), instead of using tables.

Let’s get on with the newsletter.

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1. allinwhat? Part III
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In the previous two newsletters I’ve highlighted some of the modifiers I regularly use when searching for information at Google. These modifiers are useful for refining the information that Google gives back to you, meaning more targetted results.

Today, I’ll finish the series with a few more of my favourite, and most used modifiers.

1. intitle:
Using this modifier returns only those pages that have the keyword in the title. To use it, do not include a space after the colon.

e.g. intitle:tutorial

Returns only those documents that contain the word tutorial in the title. The real power of this modifier is when you use it like this:

adobe photoshop intitle:tutorial

The adobe photoshop bit at the beginning means Google will look for pages about Adobe Photoshop. The modifier “modifies” this search query to only return pages that page the word tutorial in the title.

2. Site:
This modifier is an interesting one. It will return pages from the site you specify. To use it, do not include a space between the colon and the site.

e.g.

site:ezseonews.com

This will return only those pages from my ezseonews.com domain. It will tell me exactly how many pages are indexed in Google.

If I wanted to find an article on my site, e.g. that I know contains the phrase “build a sitemap”, I could type this:

“build a sitemap” site:ezseonews.com

You can also use the “-” sybmol to remove certain domains from the results.

e.g.

“build a sitemap” -site:ezseonews.com

will return pages that contain the phrase “build a sitemap”, but exclude any pages on my ezseonews.com site.

You can use this modifier in a slightly different way. Try this one:

“build a sitemap” site:edu

That will return only those pages that contain “build a sitemap”, but only from .edu domains.

This can be useful if you want to restrict your searches to certain geographical areas. e.g.

“build a sitemap” site:.co.uk

(NOTE: you can include the “.” before the domain extension if your wish, or leave it out. The results are the same).

Will return pages only from .co.uk domains. Or I could exclude all .co.uk domains by typing in this:

“build a sitemap” -site:.co.uk

I hope you have found this series of article interesting.

If you want to read about more of these modifiers, you can read about them here.

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2. Matt Cutts Site Reviews
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One of my SEO Website Builder users posted a message on the SEO WSB forum highlighting a very informative post by Matt Cutts (Google Engineer). In it, he comments on several websites, and shows how easy it is to dig the dirt on webmasters. He also gives you some clues as to what Google really want.

It’s well worth a read – Matt Cutts

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3. CSS Mini-Course Part I
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Simply put, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a powerful “tool” that webmasters have available to them, to help them design and then further maintain the look and feel of their sites, with minimum effort.

Today I just want to wet your appetite for style sheets, and show you their potential. In the coming weeks, I’ll show you how to do this yourself.

In what follows, I’ll show you some example pages, and invite you to look at the source code of those pages. To do that, right click the web page, and select “View Source”. Alternatively, you can view the source code of the pages by using the View menu at the top of your browser (some basic HTML knowledge is required to follow what is going on).

OK, let’s begin with a simple example.

You know those horribly large H1 header tags? To make your site look more professional, you might want to make those headers smaller. You could just use an H2 or H3 header, but then you risk losing the possible SEO benefits of an H1 tag.

Using CSS, you can make them appear smaller, but then you can also make them smaller using standard HTML tags in the page, so why bother with CSS?

Have a look at the source code of this page. It uses HTML tags in the web page to control the sizes of the font.

I can even control the fonts using HTML tags in the document. Here, take a look at the source of this page.

Now look at this page, which uses CSS to control the size and the font of the text.

What do you notice about the source code of these different pages?

Do you see how there is no HTML formatting tags in the page using CSS? All the page does is specify which text is an H1 header, and which text is a paragraph. Even without these formatting tags, the text is formatted!

Do you also see that the non-CSS pages need to have the HTML tags to tell the web browser which fonts and sizes to use.

You should notice that the size of the non-CSS files are larger than those using CSS, and far more complex.

Now, imagine you have 100 pages on a site, and you want to change the font sizes and colours on all 100 pages. If you have used HTML to specify size and style of your fonts, then you’ll need to change 100 pages. However, if you use CSS to control the size and style, you only need to edit one file.

To demonstrate this, look at this web page.

The source of that web page is identical to the source of this one.

The only difference is that I have used a different style sheet (to simulate the editing of the original style sheet) to control the appearance.

That means, by editing one file (the style sheet) I made sweeping changes to the appearance of the page (and every page using that style sheet).

On a 100 page site using CSS to control the appearance, all 100 pages would have changed the moment I uploaded my edited style sheet. Now can you see the potential?

Have a look at these two HTML documents:

Non-CSS page

CSS Page

You can see that the non-CSS is more complex.

Which would you imagine was the bigger file (and remember bigger = slower loading).

Well, the CSS page looks more complicated, but here are the file sizes:

non-css file: 485 bytes

css file: 407 bytes

The CSS file is smaller. Now you may be thinking that its not that much smaller, but we are talking about a page that has very little content.

To give you a better idea, when I switched my ezseonews.com site over from non-CSS to CSS, the file size of the homepage went from 18 Kb down to 12 Kb.

What I have shown you is only the beginning. CSS can be used to position elements on your page, such as right and left menus. Have a look at my ezseonews.com homepage, and view the source. Most beginners would have used tables to position the left and right menus (and my original site did), but I have used CSS. It means quicker loading times of the pages, and smaller, less-complex code.

In the coming weeks, I’ll show you how to do all of this for yourself )

This is CSS section is now part of a much bigger course available as part of the CSS Tutorial PDF eBook.

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4. November Niche Blueprint Released
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The November Niche Blueprint was released on Friday. This Niche Blueprint was written around a niche that is huge, and getting bigger all the time. The potential market for this product (and related products) is simply mind-boggling.

While I would highly recommend building an affiliate site around this niche (2 Commission Junction Merchants with 3 months EPC over $40), you could also do well building an Adsense site, with Google estimated CPCs between $4 and $5 for some phrases.

This niche is a fantastic opportunity for you to build a “fat” affiliate site, as a newsletter is an obvious component, and what’s more, it will almost write itself (see the notes.txt file if you buy this blueprint).

OK, so some details of the keywords in this niche?

The Niche has over 2000 keywords, with:

1742 phrases have less than 1000 competing pages with 348 of them having 5 or more daily searches at Google alone (3000+ daily searches on these 348 phrases).

239 phrases have 5 or more daily searches and less than 100 competing pages (1735 daily searches at Google for these 239 phrases).

155 phrases have 5 or more daily searches with 10 or less competing pages (1084 daily searches at Google for these 155 phrases).

66 phrases have 5 or more daily searches an ZERO competing pages in Google (418 daily searches at Google for these 66 phrases).

The niche should beinteresting for anyone interested in books, films or “literature” in the widest sense of the word.

As always, only 100 will be sold. If you are interested, you can buy it from:

http://niche-blueprints.com

Click on the link in the upper right to the November 2006 blueprint.

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5. Site Build It! Video Tour
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I often get asked about Site Build It! (SBI) as a package for building web sites, and how it compares to other tools like my own SEO Website Builder, or XSite Pro. To be honest, there is no real comparison, as SBI is a complete suite of programs, whereas the latter two are just website editors.

I reviewed SBI quite some time ago after having built a site with it (in fact, I started out online with an SBI site). However, since I wrote that review, SBI has changed dramatically adding lots of great new features. I cannot review it now as I no longer use SBI, but if you want more details of this package, Ken Evoy (SBI creator) has come out with a set of videos that showcase this remarkable tool. You can watch it here:

Video Tour

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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