EzSEO Newsletter # 145
December 3, 2006 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 145
Andy Williams
“Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”
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This week:
1. Google Graph showing your link neighbourhood
2. CSS Mini-series Part II
3. Competition Dominator
Hi again.
December already. Wow, this year has flown by very quickly. It’s almost time to reevaluate our New Year resolutions from 11 months ago, and see whether we achieved them. We can then start the whole process off again with more resolutions.
In one years time, what do you want to have achieved?
As with any kind of goal setting, you really need to have an idea of how to achieve the goal. Small steps are bigger than jumps, and rewards along the way are vital.
OK, on with the newsletter.
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1. See the Web the way Google does.
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Here is a great little tool that allows you to see the web the way Google does.
Touch Graph’s Google Browser displays links between sites and visualizes the interrelated nature of these web sites.
Find out who is linking to you, and who is linking to the sites that link to you (might be a good way to find link partners).
I highly recommend you read the full instructions. This one is quite addictive, though I wonder if there are some bugs, since some URLs I try don’t seem to produce any results.
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2. CSS Mini-series Part II
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Last week I gave you an introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) by showing you some examples of text formatting using stylesheets. You also saw how quickly you can change the look and feel of a complete site, by changing one file – the stylesheet.
Today, we’ll continue with this introduction by looking at another powerful use of CSS – tableless web page layout, and I’ll show you some simple examples of what is possible.
Remember, today is just part of the introduction. I wont be showing you today how to do this for yourself. That will come later in the mini-series.
OK, let’s start off by looking at a web page which has been laid out using tables. Look at this page, and examine the source code:
Those of you familiar with HTML tables will see a simple 3 column, 3 row table, where some of the cells have been joined to form the header and the footer cells.
OK, now let’s look at another page which has the same layout, but uses CSS instead:
Have a look at the source code behind this page.
You’ll notice that there are no table tags. Each section of the page (header, menus, footer and main section) are contained in their own little blocks of code.
Each block of code starts with a line that tells the web browser how to format that section.
e.g. div id=”main” tells the browser to use the “main” formatting defined in the stylesheet.
This should start to make more sense as we go through this mini-series, so don’t become disheartened if you are finding this difficult.
If we compare the table, and tableless html files, there isn’t much difference in the size of the two pages. However, the look of the CSS one is crisper and clearer (try looking at both web pages in different browsers and I think you’ll agree).
The positioning of the page layout using CSS is done with pinpoint accuracy, whereas the page designed with tables is more likely to suffer problems as you add content (and require graphics to help space out the columns properly).
OK, now look at this page:
This is the same file as the first CSS layout, but I have edited the stylesheet. Imagine if you had 100 pages on your site, and you could change the look of the site, this dramatically, by changing one file. Are you seeing the potential of CSS?
In the first two parts of this mini-series, I hope I have shown you the potential of CSS. Starting in the next newsletter, I’ll be teaching you how to do this, starting at the absolute beginning, and taking you through it all in baby steps. I will assume a little HTML knowledge, but otherwise, I am hoping to create a mini-series that can be used by complete novices.
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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3. Competition Dominator
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On Friday I sent out a mid-week special notice about a great new tool I have been testing. I know from the feedback I got that a lot of you were very interested in this tool, and many bought it.
If you missed that mailing, the reason for sending it on Friday was that the price was going up then, and I didn’t want you missing out on the low price ($70 discount on full price). The price has since gone up ($117 at the time of writing this), and will continue to rise until it reaches its full price of $167, so you can still get it with a discount if you are quick.
See this page for more information.
I thought I’d follow up that posting by letting you know how I have been using the tool.
Imagine you want to create a site in a particular niche, e.g. dog training, and you intend to promote your site with some pay-per-click advertising.
Where do you start? Which keywords do you bid on, and what kind of ads should you write? Well, these are just some of the answers that this software can provide.
Create a new “Competition Analysis” project, and call it “Dog Training”.
You are next asked for your keyword list. I’d go off to Wordtracker for this to research my list of phrases, but you can use the built in quick option of Overture if you want. In that case, just type in a seed word e.g. dog training, and let the software do its thing.
Once the keywords are in there, start the analysis by clicking the “Download/Refresh Data” button in the toolbar. Now you need to wait a few minutes while data is retrieved.
When the results come back, you’ll see all of the main competitors in the “dog training” niche who advertise on Google, MSN, and/or Yahoo. Not only this, but you can see exactly which keywords they are bidding on, and the actual ads they are using, plus their landing pages.
Now, the next step gives this data real power. Over the next few weeks, update the data every few days by clicking the “Download/Refresh Data” button.
What this does is it re-evaluates all of the keywords, the ads, the ad positions etc.
Why is this important?
Well, it allows to monitor your competitors PPC activities over time, and learn from their mistakes before you make them yourself. You can see which ads constantly perform well, which ones are dropped, which keywords are consistently producing returns for the advertisers. All of this is great information, and will help you formulate your own PPC strategy. If another website runs a certain ad for a long time, it must be producing a good return, right?
This type of research information means you can cut out a lot of the trial and error involved in setting up PPC campaigns. You can go straight in with what is already working. How much is that worth to you?
If you are interested in getting this tool yourself, here is the URL.
Just one final word about this software. The results you will get depends heavily on how you select your phrases. For the most comprehensive tutorial on researching keywords, see my f-re-e Wordtracker Tutorial.
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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