It's almost the end of the month, which means it's almost time for me to give away a signed copy of my AdSense book Make Easy Money with Google. All you need to do to get your chance at winning is to subscribe to my announcement list, a low-volume mailing list that I use to keep in touch with readers of my book and/or blog. At the end of each month I draw a name at random from the list of current subscribers and send that person a free signed copy of the book.

I also send out the occasional special offer or preview some new material I'm working on to members of the list. Yesterday, for example, I offered to feature subscriber's AdSense success stories in an upcoming magazine interview I'm doing.

Please note that if you subscribe to my list you should be prepared to receive emails from me. The winner of the first draw last month didn't answer repeated emails from me, hence that person lost their chance at the free book and the book has been returned to the book pool for a future drawing.

The AdSense case study will continue later today or tomorrow. We're at Stage 2, which is all about optimizing pages for AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

Alright, I'm almost set to unveil Stage 2 of my AdSense case study featuring my Invisible Fence Guide. If you haven't been following along, please refer to my previous comments about Stage 1 of the case study.

But let's talk some more about the Guide as it exists today. It's been about two weeks since I put up the site, but a lot has happened in those two weeks, the most important thing being that the site has been indexed in Google.

Do a Google search on “invisible fence” (without the quotes) and you'll see that my Guide is at about position #77 in the search results. This is pretty much what I expected. The site holding the #1 position is the official Invisible Fence corporate site, which is no surprise.

But… search for “invisible fence guide” (again, without the quotes) and you'll see that my Guide holds the first position for that combination of keywords.

There are several things I'd like you to note here:

• You can get a good position for specific keywords with simple search engine optimization techniques.
• You don't need a fancy site.
• Search engines are the best way to get traffic, so get as high a listing as you can.
• Focus on lesser-used keywords.
• Use a blog to get quick indexing of a site.

Note that the pages in my Guide do not have any PageRank yet, but that doesn't prevent them from being indexed and from ranking highly. PageRank is just one factor. Yes, you want to get high PageRank, but a low PageRank doesn't stop people from finding you. And yes, I've gotten search engine traffic already for my site.

More to come…

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

Sigh, you'd think I'd know better. Shortly after making my Invisible Fence Guide public as an AdSense case study, I decided to move the files for the first stage of the case study into a new folder on the website. On most systems, this is trivial to do: log into your web host and rename the folder and voila, the content's in a new folder. Then all you do is fixup a few of the internal links in the content and you're back in business.

Of course, it's never that simple. Once you've made a page public, removing it is a big no-no. Why? Because other sites, including search engines, that link to that page will all of a sudden return a big “oh-oh, the page is missing” error when visitors try to follow the link. That's not good, not good at all. To paraphrase DeBeers, “a web page is forever”. Once a page is up, keep it there. You see, I had forgotten about the link from the actual case study page to the first stage's home page. So here I was sending people to the case study page and they'd click on the link and get a big error message. Good move, Eric!

The solution is to never remove a page but instead to redirect the visitor to the appropriate (new) page. A redirection is basically the web server telling the web browser: “Yo! The page you want isn't at that address anymore, go to this page instead.” Most of the time this happens so quickly that the user doesn't even realize it.

How you redirect the page depends on how much access you have to the web server hosting your site/blog. If you have access, you can actually get the web server to send a redirect code directly to the browser. If you don't, you have to resort to trimming the original page and using a META tag or even a bit of JavaScript in the now-much-shorter page to do the redirection. The first method (web server does the redirection) is much better, as search engines and so on will follow the redirection automatically. If you can't do it that way, then be sure to include a link to the new page from the newly-trimmed original page so that search engines can at least find the new page that way.

For more help on this topic, just do a Google search for “redirecting a web page” and you'll find lots of information.

The caveat in all of this is to test and retest the links on your own sites to make sure that you're getting the results you expected. Even seasoned pros can make mistakes, but it sure looks bad when they do!

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.