Most SEO techniques are on-page techniques: choosing a good title (perhaps the one thing you totally control that most influences where your pages shows up in the search engine results), keyword density, etc. And for AdSense publishers these techniques also lead to better ad targeting, so there’s a double whammy of benefits in doing on-page SEO.

At some point, though, you can’t do anything more to the page itself, which is where the off-page factors come into play. Or maybe you can’t change the page at all, meaning off-page is all you can do anyhow.

To make this case study fair, I’m going to use some pages from a site that I don’t control and don’t directly make me any money. The site is the Sybase site. Sybase is my employer and I think some of its pages could use a boost in the search engine results. So let’s see what I can do to help. Maybe I’ll fail miserably… that’s why these case studies are so exciting

Choose Your Targets

The first thing I need to do is select the individual pages I want to influence. Search engine results are all about placements of pages, not sites.

If you’re selling things, the first pages you should look at are those that describe your products and services. Sybase has many products, most for enterprises (geektalk for large companies), and I’m going to focus on three of them: SQL Anywhere, RFID Anywhere, and Mobile Office. I’ve worked on all three products and so they’re special to me in that way.

The very first thing to do is see how well the product names rank in Google. You want your products to be in the top 10 if possible, ideally in the first one or two spots. Right now, this is what I see:

• SQL Anywhere — ranks #1 for sql anywhere and “sql anywhere”
• RFID Anywhere — ranks #1 for rfid anywhere and “rfid anywhere”
• Mobile Office — ranks #12 for mobile office and #11 for “mobile office”

SQL Anywhere and RFID Anywhere have ideal placements for their product names, but Mobile Office needs some work. The term “mobile office” is much more generic, so it’s not surprising that Mobile Office isn’t in the top ten… yet.

Going Beyond Product Names

Product names are the obvious things to target, but you’ll also want to target other keywords. Finding those keywords can be a challenge, but there are some great free tools you can use to help you along the way.

Take the SQL Anywhere product, for example. It has a 70% share of the mobile database market (it’s database software that can be run on mobile devices like laptops, BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile handhelds, and so on) but it doesn’t even rank in the top ten for the term mobile database, though it does squeek in at #10 for “mobile database”. So there’s one obvious keyphrase to work on.

If you’re not sure which keywords to target, spend an afternoon with the AdWords keyword tool. Start by taking the URL of each page you’re interested in and seeing what the keyword tool thinks of the page. You’ll quickly put together a list of relevant keywords, some of which may surprise you. You can’t do them all, though, so you’ll have to prune the list and find just a few — maybe three or four — to concentrate on.

More about list gathering next time…

Every once in a while, though, it’s good to step back and look at the wider picture. If you’ve done this for a while now, you’ve surely developed some expertise or understanding of how things work on the Web. Why not use this expertise to benefit someone else for a change, without them knowing about it?

There are all kinds of “random acts of SEO kindness” you can do that will benefit others. Here are a few suggestions:

• Bookmark someone else’s page. We all know that Social Bookmarking Is Today’s Big Thing and so we’re busy bookmarking our own sites… Well, go and bookmark your favorite charity’s site. Or your child’s school site. Or a site you just like. (Side benefit here: your bookmarking account won’t get flagged for just bookmarking your own sites…)
• Submit articles that link to other sites. Do you have access to an article submission service like Article Marketing Automation? Submit an article that benefits someone else.
• Link to other sites. It’s tempting to hoard PageRank by linking as little as you can to other sites… but PR ultimately depends on sites linking to other sites to work. Give a real link to a site you like from one of your own pages and spread the wealth.

That’s just scratching the surface, of course, I’m sure you can come up with your own ideas. How about setting up a Google custom search portal for your favorite local team or charity and making them a few bucks that way? Or teaching what you’ve learned about the Web to others?

Random acts of SEO kindness won’t make you any money, but they’ll make you feel better, and that’s a different kind of reward.

More details about AdWords can also be found in the AdSense FAQ (frequently asked questions), specifically in the answer to What is AdSense?.

• Add the AdSense FAQ RSS feed to your favorite browser/reader, or
• Subscribe to a notification list by sending a blank email to memwg@aweber.com.

Also, at the bottom of each AdSense FAQ entry there’s a link back to this blog for making comments and suggestions relating to that entry. I didn’t want to retrofit a commenting system on that site, so it seemed simplest to just let the comments flow back to this blog. I also fixed a stupid mistake: there was no link to the AdSense FAQ from any of the other pages on EricGiguere.com! You’d think that with 15 years of site building experience I’d remember to give a new section an internal link or two…

I’m planning on having a new entry out shortly. Keep the ideas coming!

Of course, as I’ve said before, you have to take the values published in these lists with a large grain of salt. Just because an advertiser is paying $30+ a click for the #1 ad spot on Google for “mortgage refinancing”, that doesn’t mean that you’ll get $30+ per click from the ads on your “mortgage refinancing” blog. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee you won’t see anything near that amount…. let alone how you’ll get traffic to your blog in such a competitive industry.

High-paying keyword lists should come with a disclaimer: “For Amusement Only”

More than you think, but also less than you think… most sites are in the “long tail” of the earnings curve. Forget optimization and keyword selection, in the end it’s all about one thing: traffic.

There’s only one question in the AdSense FAQ so far: What is AdSense?, which is a short explanation of AdSense and AdWords (the two are intertwined). Look for more — I’ll post a note here when I put more content up.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that PLRPro was expanding its services to include some new features. One of these new features is the Article Marketing Automation service. It’s free to PLRPro members but is also available independently for $47/month, which is substantially less than the $197/month PLRPro is going to be charging soon for its members.

Article Marketing Automation

AMA is actually two things:

1. a network of independent sites and blogs that have agreed to distribute AMA articles; and
2. a human-controlled content rewriter

Let’s look at the network first.

The Article Site Network

A key characteristic of an article distribution system is how many sites are in its distribution network. The more sites you can get you content to, the more links you’ll get to your own sites. Unlike other systems, though, AMA isn’t limited to established article directories. Rather, it targets blogs and CMS (content management systems) based sites — any site that has a remote publishing API (application programming interface — a way for computer programs to talk to it) can be added to the network. This includes WordPress blogs (both self-hosted and on WordPress.com), Blogger blogs, Drupal sites, Joomla sites, etc.

Note that you don’t have to subscribe to the service to have your site included in the distribution network. Just sign up for a free AMA account and add your sites to the network.

Sites get added into specific categories on the network, and site owners have the option of seeing and manually approving any and all articles before they get added to their sites. This is a great way to ensure that only quality content makes it onto a site. The only restriction is that site owners are not allowed to modify the links in the articles.

When you submit an article to the network, the article is not broadcast to all sites on the network. Rather, it is “drip-fed” to a few random sites at a time over several days or weeks, and only to sites that match the article’s category. So links build slowly over time, which is a great feature.

Note that unlike every other system I’ve seen, AMA doesn’t restrict you to using links in the “bio box” of an article. In fact, you don’t even need a “bio box” if you don’t want one. You can embed up to 3 links anywhere within the article content. That’s a big plus in my book! You can even vary the links using the article rewriting feature.

The Article Rewriter

The article network is the most important feature of Article Marketing Automation, but close behind is the article rewriting system. Now let me point out that this feature is completely optional: you can submit articles directly to the network with no rewriting and they’ll get distributed with no changes.

Content rewriting is all about generating “unique” (or at least “semi-unique”) content. You do this by replacing words, phrases, and paragraphs with alternate versions that have the same meaning. AMA builds a “unique” article from the alternate text you’ve submitted.

Here’s a simple example:

When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the {red~blue~green~brown~yellow} ones last?

This would generate any of these phrases:

• When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?
• When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the blue ones last?
• When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the green ones last?
• When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the brown ones last?
• When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the yellow ones last?

The replacements can include HTML and can even happen inside links. So you can vary anchor text quite easily:

The <a href=”http://www.memwg.com”>{best~most fantabulous~super} AdSense blog</a>

You can even vary the link destinations if you want. You can also nest alternatives within other alternatives.

This is not the first content rewriting system I’ve used, but it’s more powerful than the ones I’ve seen so far because of its flexibility — it’s implemented the way I would’ve done it myself.

Note that article rewriting is non-trivial if you’re doing more than simple synonym substitutions. But if you’re concerned about creating unique content, it’s worth the effort and this system is quite flexible. (There’s also a more traditional wizard-style interface that lets you do rewriting if you’re not comfortable with inserting the special syntax into the content yourself.)

Conclusion

So far I only have a few articles in the system, but the results are encouraging, I’m seeing a bit of traffic already. I can track how many copies of each article have been submitted and published and over time I expect to have lots of links going back to my sites. This system is great for getting backlinks and traffic, and it’s all very whitehat stuff. If you’re looking for an article distribution system, this is the one I now recommend.

• Had a great time in Paris. The waiters are as cranky as usual (they can afford to be — it’s hard to fire anyone and the tips are automatically added to the bills) and I still don’t know how people afford to live there, but it was a nice vacation.
• I didn’t actually publish anything while I was gone, oh well… watch this space shortly for some new stuff, though.
• I may keep this blog on moderated comments for a while, we’ll see.
• PayPal helpfully unsubscribed me from all my services (again!) when I changed the primary credit card for my account. Moral of the story: don’t change the primary credit card, ever!.
• Google changed the HTML used for its search results pages, which basically broke any software that scraped those results. I’ll be releasing an updated to my Article Gatherer shortly because of this. If you’re an AG customer and not on either the PLRSiteBuilder or Article Gatherer mailing lists, contact me off the list to get your update.
• It looks like Google is putting more emphasis on newer content in determining rankings. For example, the Invisible Fence Guide has recently dropped a couple of notches with no real reason. Adding fresh content is the simplest way to keep your site’s rankings ups, but that can be challenging.
• Canadian AdSense publishers using EFT (electronic funds transfer) for their payments might be seeing some bizarre things in their account right now. The August payment was sent using a 1:1 ratio for Canadian to US dollars, which was wrong — we got underpaid. So they’re doing some bookkeeping magic to correct the problem. You’ll eventually see the amount transferred deducted and then readded to your earnings, with an additional payment being sent to offset the underpayment. You may also see a message stating that your account is on hold because of a failed EFT — don’t panic, that’s how they’re doing the bookkeeping magic. Everything should be corrected in a couple of days.

Back to the real world…

Anyhow, I put together a silly little online tool called How Much Of The Web Do You Own? that you can use to determine your own percentage. First calculate how many pages you have on all your sites — use the Yahoo! Site Explorer to get the numbers, it’s more accurate than Google’s site: command — and plug that number into the tool. Then bash your head against the desk…

Think of it from the AdSense publisher’s perspective. If each page you own (and “own” can be defined pretty loosely to mean any page which you can monetize via AdSense) makes you an average of 1 cent per day (I’m just pulling that number from a hat), then 100 pages doesn’t make you much — a whole $1/day. You need to get up to 10,000 pages to start seeing a significant amount of $100/day. Just think of what you could make with a million or so pages…

Yes, I am a member. All existing members will get grandfathered into the upgraded service and won’t have to pay the newer monthly rate, which is essentially double the old rate of $97/month.

Note that you don’t get access to the new PLRPro services until next month. You do get access to the PLRPro content, though, for the current month and all subsequent months until you cancel. You also get access to some members-only blogs and article directories for getting backlinks to your sites and various books and forum postings on how to do things, including a nice little book on setting up your own VRE (virtual real estate) network of sites. Just remember my tip on profitable AdSense article marketing if you’re going to rewrite some of the articles for submission to article directories in order to drive traffic to your AdSense sites.

If any PLRPro subscribers are reading this, feel free to leave a comment detailing your experiences with the service. On the whole I’ve heard nothing but good things. It’s not the only program out there, but it seems to be one of the best.

P.S.: I should also mention that PLRPro also has an ebook service which is quite good. Each month you get 3 ebooks complete with (and this is what I really like) an audio version of the book, 4 different websites for selling it, an autoresponder sequence, a teaser ebook for giveaways (to encourage people to subscribe to your autoresponder), a custom WordPress blog theme and a bunch of articles for traffic purposes. If you join PLRPro you get access to the ebook service for $42/month more.

Normally, the AdWords keyword tool gives you at most 200 keyword ideas. What most people don’t know is that the list of keywords can vary on each request. So by running the tool multiple times on the same keyword you can generate a slightly larger set of keywords.

Here are the steps:

1. Search for a keyword (or analyze a site)
2. Scroll through the results and click all the Add all links so all the keywords end up in the list on the righthand side of the browser window
3. Go back to the top and hit the Get keyword ideas button again.
4. Scroll through the results. Any new keywords not already in the list will be obvious, since they’re in blue and the other ones are in grey.
5. Repeat this process until you don’t get any more keywords. Try checking or unchecking the Use synonyms option while doing this to get even more keywords.

The only downside with this approach is that when you move the keywords over into the righthand side you lose all the search and competition data. If you plan on analyzing the data, you’ll want to download the spreadsheet format for the keyword data after each press of the Get keyword ideas. You’ll then have to merge the data into one big spreadsheet.

The idea is very simple: buy low, sell high. You write two sets of content for a given topic/niche: one set (the traffic set) is for distribution on other sites, the other set (the money set) is for publication on your own site. The traffic set targets low-paying (but often high-traffic) keywords, the money set targets the higher-paying keywords.

Let’s use the broad topic of cooking as an example. Type cooking into the AdWords keyword tool and sort the results by search volume and you’ll get something like this:

Many cooking terms aren’t going to pay you much per-click — remember, the values you see here are what AdWords advertisers pay to have their ads shown on Google, the earnings AdSense publishers make from ads will be much lower. What we’re looking for are relative values, however. Here’s how I’d group the keywords shown above:

I’ve arbitrarily chosen the $2 mark as the cutoff between the two sets: keywords in the traffic set have values less than $2, those in the money set have values more than $2. Notice how the traffic keywords are generally about “do-it-yourself” cooking and the money keywords are about formal cooking instruction.

For traffic, then, write articles about recipes and cooking techniques and distribute them using EzineArticles, iSnare, and other article directories and submission services. For example, “How To Cook A Turkey” would target the “cooking turkey” keyword. On the other hand, for your own site/blog you’d want to write an article like “Cooking Classes Are For Everyone” to target the “cooking classes” and “cooking class” keywords.

The trick that makes this all work is to link the traffic article to the money article with a carefully-worded resource box:

To wow your company next Thanksgiving, take a cooking class and learn how to cook a turkey with all the trimmings. Find cooking classes near you with our national listing of cooking schools.

Notice the use of “cooking class” and “cooking schools” in the link anchor text. While the body of the article focuses on turkey cooking, the resource box focuses on the cooking classes. The two links should go directly to a page (or pages) relating to formal cooking instruction. Thus you get SEO benefits from the article (links to your pages with the all-important money keywords) and very targeted traffic (anyone who clicks the links to visit your site).

If you’ve chosen good money keywords, your per-click earnings should be much higher than they’d be if you’d just blindly targeted high-traffic keywords. (Don’t feel sad for the article directory: the directory will also make money, of course, because some of the readers will click ads on the directory site, but not as much as your pages will… although they’ll probably make more in terms of sheer volume.)

That, my friends, is the key to profitable AdSense article marketing.

The most interesting use from an AdSense publisher’s perspective is to see what Google thinks your site is about. Actually, it can be more specific than that — you can use the keyword tool to determine what Google thinks of an individual page.

Take All About CRM, a demo site I created with PLRSiteBuilder. If I run its homepage through the keyword tool, I end up with an extensive list of keywords grouped under the following primary keywords:

• customer service
• crm software
• small business
• customer relation
• crm
• customer
• software

Some miscellaneous keywords are also in the list. Most of the keywords are in the CRM category (CRM = customer relationship management), which is what I want. But not all of the keywords it lists are ones I want to target — customer service is too broad a topic, for example. This tool makes it easy to discover if your site is properly targeted or not.

It’s also a good way to determine if your topics are search-worthy or not. Plug in the URL for the Alaska Ferry Travel site and you see keywords like this:

As you can see, the site is right on target keyword-wise, but many of those keywords don’t get a lot of searches.

But so what? If those keywords are super targeted and you can get ranked for them, the small stream of traffic they generate is probably worth more than any other traffic stream.

Contrast those stats to those for the DUI Attorney Finder:

The search numbers here aren’t that hot, either — how many people other than search marketers are really looking for help with drunk driving charges? But look at the competition numbers — way higher. Just from this fact alone you can deduce that per-click revenues for “DUI attorney” type content is going to be much higher than “Alaska ferry” — and much harder to break into.

The ideal is to find keywords that have high search numbers and low competition numbers… while still being profitable. That’s really tricky, because those keywords are far and few between. It requires legwork.

Next we’ll take a look at how to use the keyword tool for effective article marketing.

1. Build yourself a list of popular news and general interest sites, high-traffic sites whose content changes a lot and is geared towards a general audience. Sites like Yahoo!, Wikipedia and CNN fit the bill. If you’re a techie you might also want to throw in more techie-oriented sites like News.com.
2. Go the AdWords keyword tool and select Website content under How would you like to generate keyword ideas?
3. Now on the right type in the URL of one of the sites in your list, being sure to check Include other pages on my site linked from this URL
4. Press the Get keyword ideas button. The keyword tool will crunch away for a minute and analyze the content of the site you gave it to come up with a list of relevant keywords complete with bidding costs and search volumes.

So what do you do with this information? Some people will tell you to enter a large value for the maximum CPC bid to see which of the niches pay a lot per click. You can do this, but take the values you see with a grain of salt — see my high-paying AdSense keyword lists series for the reasons why. Don’t worry too much about maximum values. Look more at volume and competition estimates. Try bidding down the CPC value to see at what point bid positions shift from the 1-3 range to the 4-6 range.

The goal here is to come up with ideas for things you wouldn’t have thought of yourself while avoiding niches that are obviously going to pay you just a few cents per click. Do this procedure for each of your news/interest sites and do it over the span of a few days and you should come across several potential niche ideas that hold promise.

The first is to use my free Rank Checker tool. It’s a desktop application where you feed it a bunch of URLs and a bunch of keywords and it tells you which URLs rank for which keywords. I released it as a “mystery tool”, and I might still charge for it, so get it now while it’s free…

Anyhow, the other way to do it involves these steps:

• Start a copy of Firefox.
• If you haven’t already, install the SEO Tools for Firefox add-in. (You’ll have to restart Firefox.)
• Go to the Google home page and click the Preferences link. Set the preferences to display 100 results per page and save the preferences.
• Make sure the SEO Tools plugin is enabled — the “SEO” icon in the bottom right of the status bar should be in color.
• Search Google for the keyword/phrase of interest. You’ll see a bunch of extra information at the bottom of each item in the Google results page. These are inserted automatically by the SEO Tools extension. Right now you’re mainly interested in the position, i.e. “#1″, “#2″, etc.
• Hit CTRL+F to bring up the Firefox search box. Type in the start of the URL you’re interested in tracking. (If I want to see what position this blog is in, I just look for memwg.com.) After typing in the URL (or partial URL), click the “Next” button immediately to the right of the search bar.
• If your URL is in the results, you’ll jump immediately to it and see what position you’re at.
• If not, go to the next page of the results and click the Next button again. Repeat this process as many times as necessary until you either find your site or run out of results.

The key is the 100 results per page setting — it makes the process much less tedious.

Don’t forget that the results you see are dependent on which Google site you’re using, what language you’re targeting, etc.

Now the question is, will depenalization affect the other pages on the site as well? Currently none of the other pages shown any PageRank, despite the home page having PR 5. PageRank values in the Google toolbar are not updated on a daily basis like search engine results are, so it may be weeks or months before the site’s “real” PR values get reflected externally.

I’m still looking at what to do with affiliate links, though. There are differing opinions about them.

Hopefully the depenalization means more AdSense publishers will find this blog and subscribe to it… I’ve seen a recent jump in subscriptions to the feed, actually, I wonder if it can be attributed to the depenalization…

My first impression of the Knol homepage was “uh oh, spam city” because of the topics of the featured articles: cancer, diabetes, and other ailments. Typical fare for a low-quality info site, in other words. But a closer look showed that the articles were actually high quality, written by medical specialists. And there were no ads on those articles, so money wasn’t the motivation for writing them. (Well, maybe Google paid them… but they weren’t MFA articles.) It sounds like Google rounded up some people beforehand to write quality articles for the site.

Still, this is an AdSense blog, so let’s get to the topic everyone’s interested in…. How do you make money with Knol? The obvious answer is through its integration with your AdSense account.

When you register with Knol, you have the option of associating your AdSense account with your user profile. You must do this explicitly, even if your login is the same as your AdSense account login, and you’ll get an email from Google asking you to OK the association. Once you do that, your AdSense info is passed to Knol. There’s some kind of review that happens at this stage, which may take up to 2 weeks to happen. If you’re approved (I wonder if they’re looking to keep out obvious spammers) then AdSense ads will appear on any knols you author and the clicks will go straight to your AdSense account.

Knol has an unfair advantage over other revenue-sharing info sites. Unlike those sites, you don’t have to share your AdSense revenue with Google, since of course they already make money from every AdSense click no matter where it happens. Presumably this is going to make Knol more appealing than Squidoo and other place that take a cut of the AdSense revenue to support their business model.

Expect to see spam show up on Knol, of course. I know of at least one person who’s released a tool to automatically submit articles to Knol. All links on Knol are “nofollow”, however, so from an SEO perspective getting links from Knol to your sites won’t do you much good… but they may still be good for traffic. And then there’s the revenue-sharing…. there’s definitely some appeal there for the shadier types.

What I’m really interested in seeing is if Knol pages get high rankings in search engine results the same way that Google favors Wikipedia pages. Given that everyone’s talking about Knol, presumably there will be a large number of natural links pointing to the Knol site to give it good PageRank. Will that be enough to overtake Wikipedia in the long term? Guess we’ll have to wait and see….