I have to warn you though. I haven’t quite mastered the art of building mini sites but I hope that this article will still prove useful to you.

For everyone who thinks about creating a mini site I can only say: Simply try it. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot of things while creating these mini sites and that’s why I will keep on creating more of them. The most important thing you shouldn’t underestimate with building mini sites is that you gain lots of experience especially concerning SEO.

My Experiment

I created my two first mini sites 2-3 months ago and simply wanted to see whether it would be worth it and whether it’s easy to make money through them.

Travel Mini Site

My first mini site is a travel related site. On it I simply offer information on traveling. This includes pictures from trips I did and lots of other things. With my travel mini site I haven’t tried too much out yet and to be honest the only way I am trying to make money through it is by using Adsense in combination with Amazon’s affiliate network.

To say the least I haven’t made any money through it. Not through Adsense and also not through Amazon’s program. The reason might be one of very obvious thing: Not enough traffic.

I haven’t really put much effort into building links for this web site. The funny thing was that the mini site immediately started ranking number one on Yahoo, probably because of the domain name. Still this doesn’t mean anything since I haven’t really gotten a lot of traffic from Yahoo and other search engines.

Here are some details about the site:
Backlinks: 9
PR: 0

So you can see that I haven’t really created a lot of links back to the site. Thus the traffic is … well you can’t really call it traffic Here are the analytics stats:

You can see that there is not a lot going on. Still I think it’s a great way to see that the visitors are highly interested in the content because of the high Avg. Time on Site and Pages/Visit. Note that you have to take into account that this mini site has only around 6 webpages.

Public Speaking Mini Site

I create this mini site because I wanted to create a site where I would simply focus on promoting a product. Much like Glen has done it with his Bookmarking Demon mini site.

My site is solely focused on selling a product within the public speaking niche. The website itself only has two pages and the main page solely focuses on getting people to want to buy the product.

I haven’t made money through that site either (seems like I am not very good at). Again the reason can be multiple things. Maybe the people I am driving to my website aren’t really interested in buying the product. On the other hand it could still be the problem with the low traffic. The last excuse I know of is that I am doing a poor job of selling the product.

The reason why I haven’t done anything about it is that I wanted it to rank well in Google before doing any major testing or changes. That way I would get enough traffic to be sure that the data I am collecting is reliable. That’s why I have done some more link building for this website:
Backlinks: 50
PR: 0

As you can see from below the website gets around 150-200 pageviews per month. This is not much but again I am not promoting this website and all this traffic is solely coming through my link building efforts.

The interesting thing to see here is that this mini site differs completely from the other one. You can immediately see that the Avg. Time on Site and Pages/Visit are way lower than the ones of my travel mini site. The reason is of course is that it’s built to sell a product. Keep in mind that this mini site has only two pages so the maximum Pages/Visit would be 2.

So this is all I can really tell you by now about my mini sites. As you can see I haven’t been that successful but that doesn’t matter that much to me because I have learned so much along the way.

What do you think about this experiment? Do you think it’s worth it to build mini sites? Was this useful to you?

That’s why I want to show you what websites I use on a daily basis.

Creating Better Content

We know that the content of websites is the key to being successful on the Internet. If you don’t offer good content then people will not stay on your blog very long. The websites mentioned below will help you to create better content.

Images

Finding images for blog posts is an important part of blogging. I have two major web sites I use for finding images. The first one is Sxc.hu which offers free images for everyone who signs up there. It’s a great resource and offer lots of good pictures. Be sure to check it out.
The second resource for me is Flickr as it offer some great pictures which you can freely (depending on the license) use on your website. I always use pictures with the Creative Commons Attribution license since all you need to do is to credit the author.

Quotes

If you include quotes in an article then this can make your article so much better. Of course it depends on how you use it but especially for blogs adding a quote to the end of the post can really engage your blog readers. Whenever I am looking for quotes to put in an article I visit Inspirational Quotes. It’s a great website with tons and tons of quotes.

Dictionary

Depending on which country you live in you will need a dictionary. I am German so sometimes I just have to look up some words which I know in German but which I can’t really translate. That’s when a dictionary comes in handy.

Search Engine Optimization

Every blog owners wants to rank well for certain keywords. Search engine optimization will help you just do that. Down below I have listed all the resources I use to rank better on search engines.

Keywords

Whenever I am doing keyword research for any reason I take a look at Google’s Keyword External Tool. It’s the tool I use most often. It’s a great tool for doing any major keyword research. This is simply a must for every Internet marketer.
At the moment I am using Google Adwords on some of my sites to drive traffic to them. Most of the time I end up using the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator. The tool basically shows you how much traffic you are going to get from Google Adwords based on your keywords and on how much you are willing to spend on a daily basis. If you are using Adwords then be sure to check it out.

Article Submission Sites

Article submission sites are a great way to get backlinks and traffic to your website and EzineArticles is my favorite one. There are of course lots of other submission sites but not even one comes close to the quality of EzineArticles.

Alexa

Most of the people know Alexa since it ranks every webpage based on the amount of traffic it gets. But you can also use Alexa to do keyword research and analyze other websites. The most useful tool of Alexa is the SEM tool which you only get access to if you have the Alexa toolbar installed. What this tool gives you is all the keywords that are related to a topic you chose. The keywords are for PPC campaigns and will give you a hint of what low cost keywords there are related to your topic.

Social Life

The Internet is full of social networks nowadays. I don’t necessarily mean sites like Facebook or Digg but also communities as you can often find in forums.

Forum

I have been active on a forum for some time. Bloggeries is the forum I use because it has a big blogging community. Forums are a great way to get some exposure and if done right you can drive highly interested people to your blog.

Twitter

Everyone knows Twitter by now. Twitter is a great place to get ideas or to catch up on the latest news or to simply check on your buddies. Depending on how you use it it also has the potential of driving tons and tons of people to your blog.

Making Money

There are lots of people trying to make money through the Internet. And there are lots of people who have managed to generate a decent income through it. No matter whether you are making money or not there are a few websites that are essential.

PayPal

There are lots of people using PayPal these days. If you are blogging and trying to make money then you need to sign up for a PayPal account. Most of the websites will only send you your money via PayPal that’s why having an account is indeed essential.

Affiliate Networks

There are tons of affiliate networks on the Internet. The one I like best is Clickbank because it offers tons of products and also high payouts for affiliates. If you haven’t heard about it then be sure to check it out.

What do you think? Was this list of websites useful to you? What kind of websites do you use?

Search engines are great. They help you find the information you want to find. That’s what SEO is about, trying to make your web site more accessible to others because you (hopefully) offer valuable information.

There are of course many approaches to SEO but I think some people are simply going wrong. If you solely focus on the good old search engine optimization way where you simply try to build links then you have to face some tough competition. And it’s getting harder each day. So why not be creative at trying to drive people to your web site? This is my list of the exotic approaches you can take to SEO.

Google Local Business Center

One thing that I believe particularly helps small local businesses is the Google Local Business Center which allows people to add your business to Google maps. Not only will it add you to Google’s maps but your business will also show up if someone is searching for local businesses. If someone then searches, e.g. for a lawyer from your town and you pop up then you are probably going to get a new client. That’s one of the things you can do as a small business owner. Use the opportunities that are available to you.

You can easily sign up for Local Business Center all you have to do is enter the information about your business. The great aspect about it is that you will also get free traffic when people are simply browsing across your city on Google maps and realize that you are there. Don’t forget to add your URL.

SEO for Images

Another thing I have noticed and on which I will focus on more is Google’s image search. It’s not as important on blogs that cover topics such as Internet marketing but it’s much more important for web sites that are for example about traveling. You can potentially get a lot of visitors through image search.
Just think about it:

• Not a lot of competition
• Simply optimize your pictures
• Immediate traffic
• Better as any #1 position you could get in Google

If pictures are worth a thousand words then think about what a picture is worth in the top position in Google. I think that you could get lots of traffic through pictures but there are few people who use these opportunities to their advantage.

YouTube Videos?

How about highly focused YouTube videos? They tend to show up in some search terms. So why not use them to drive traffic to your web site?  It’s easy to create a YouTube video and to upload it. Before creating one do a little bit of research and try to find out when Google tends to show YouTube videos on their search pages. What kind of keywords do you need to enter in order for a video to show up on Google?

These were just my ideas on what you could focus on to drive traffic to your blog. What do you think? Do you know of other exotic SEO strategies?

Every blogger knows about search engine optimization these days. Most of these people try to really optimize their blogs but some fail because they use special software or certain blogging platform, e.g. Blogspot.

Because there are only few guides that exist for improving your search engine ranking with Blogspot blogs I will cover some of the main aspects that should ultimately improve your ranking.

Basic Optimization

There are lots of different aspects that you should change on your blog in order to rank better with search engines.

Structure Your Text

This is actually a not so obvious thing to do but it is extremely important for humans and for search engines.

With structuring your text I mean that you should make part of the text stand out from the rest, e.g. headlines. You should wrap your headlines in <h1>, <h2> or <h3> tags depending on how important the headline is (h1 being the most important). Headlines are also great for dividing text.

You should further underline text or make it bold or italic to set it apart from the other content. Do you notice how I used headlines in this article to mark important sections?

Header and Description Optimization

Go to your control panel, to Settings -> Basics then enter the title and a keyword rich description of your blog.

You then of course need to save the changes you made. This is one step that is essential for ranking better with search engines.

Let Search Engines Find Your Blog

Another very simple step you could take is to go to your dashboard again to Settings -> Basics and then look for Add blog to our listings and Let search engines find your blog and make sure both of these options are set to Yes.

Title Optimization

The default Blogspot titles are not optimized for search engines and that is why we need to change them. Here is what we are going to change:
Default Blogspot Title: Blog Title: Post Title
SEO Post Title: Post Title: Blog Title
SEO Homepage Title: Blog Title – Keywords
We are only going to use the two latter titles since they are constructed for SEO purposes.

This might seem like a small difference but search engines actually pay a lot of attention to the first few words of your title, therefore is this change necessary.

To implement this change we need to replace the old code including the title tags with the following:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/> - Keyword1 - Keyword2</title>
</b:if>

The code above checks to see whether the page loaded is an article page and then uses the SEO post title. Otherwise it loads the homepage SEO title.

Now the last part between the <b:else/> and the </b:if> only shows up on your Homepage. Therefore you should add some keywords and replace Keyword1 etc. with keywords that you want your Blogger blog to rank for, e.g. you could replace Keyword1 with Internet Marketing.

If you are not using advanced blogger templates then go ahead and use this code, taken from an excellent article on Blogspot SEO:

<title><MainPage><$BlogTitle$></MainPage><ArchivePage>
<$BlogPageTitle$></ArchivePage>
<itempage><blogger><$BlogItemTitle$></blogger>
</itempage></title>

Change Your Meta Data

The meta data is another way to tell search engines what your web site is about. The <meta name=”description”> offers you a way to sum up your web sites in a few words (around 160 characters).

The keywords tag <meta name=”keywords”> gives you the possibility to do the same as above just by using keywords.

In order to make it easier for you I’ve provided some code for rather old Blogspot templates:

<MainPage><meta name="description" content="<$BlogDescription$>" />
</MainPage><ArchivePage><meta name="description"content="<$BlogPageTitle$>
Archive, <$BlogDescription$>" /></ArchivePage><ItemPage>
<meta name="description" content="<Blogger><$BlogItemTitle$>
</Blogger> - <$BlogTitle$>" /></ItemPage>

If you are using new advanced Blogger templates then I recommend going ahead and using this code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta name="description" content="this is the blog description" />
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" />
</b:if>

This code was taken from a different Blogger SEO guide.

Optimizing Your Links

Everyone uses links but there is one thing you need to know about them. First of all when linking to an article of yours or of somebody else, it is always advisable to change the link anchor text to something that contains keywords that you want to rank for. Here is an example of a bad anchor text:

<a href="http://myhomepage.com/image-editing">This is the Link Anchor Text</a>

In this case, let’s assume that the article located under the URL from above is about image editing. Linking to it with the following anchor text would be much better than the above, in terms of SEO.

<a href="http://myhomepage.com/image-editing">A New Image Editing Guide</a>

Notice how the keywords image, editing and guide are included. This is for SEO purposes.

One way to take this even further is to add a title attribute to the link. The title attribute is the text that will be shown when people hover over the link. Usually it is advisable to include a similar text as the anchor text:

<a title="Image Editing Guide" href="http://myhomepage.com/image-editing">
A New Image Editing Guide</a>

Of course you can vary a little bit to make it look more human but that should be a good way to increase your search engine ranking.

Improving Images Tags

One way you can improve the ranking of your pictures is to add the alt attribute to your pictures. Actually it is necessary to do so since otherwise the HTML code will be invalid. Add keywords to the alt attribute as shown in the section above.

<img src="http://myhomepage.com/image_editing_guide.jpg"
alt="image editing guide" />

Change the File Name of your Pictures
Another way to optimize images is to use a descriptive file name. Again instead of using a file name such as DSC_001.jpg you could change it to image_editing_guide.jpg if the file is about image editing.

Adding a Related Post Plug-in

Related posts are a great way to show readers what other content you have similar to the one they just viewed. When using WordPress there a lots of these plug-ins but on Blogspot the whole thing is a little more complicated.

Luckily there is a way to add related posts to your blog, just follow the steps outlined in the related posts article.

Comment Optimization

You do not have a lot of options with which you can optimize comments in Blogspot. However there are a few changes that you can make to get a lot more and better comments.

First of all one of the things people keep complaining about is that on Blogger blogs only registered users can post comments but there is actually a way that other people can post comments too.

Again visit your dashboard and go to Settings -> Comments and enable the showing of comments (should be enabled by default), otherwise the all the comments will be hidden.

Then go down further to the section Who Can Comment? and click on Anyone.

In the next section (shown in the picture above) choose the option Embedded below post to add the comment form to the article footer.

Feed Optimization

The RSS feed is very important on blogs since that is the way your followers receive articles. In Blogspot you are very limited to enchance your feed but there are still a few options you can change.

To change a few options go to your dashboard and then click on Settings -> Site Feed. Set the option Allow Blog Feeds to Full in order to gain more RSS subscribers.

Then go to the section below labeled Post Feed Redirect URL and enter a URL if you are using a special feed service such as Feedburner.

Conclusion

This article covered some very basic techniques and also some more advanced ones. If you are still not sure whether what you are doing is right than just contact me via Twitter or leave a comment.

Not only will the new link tag help in fighting duplicate content but it will also probably increase your web site’s link popularity. Why is that? Let’s take a look at an example.

Suppose most visitors visit your web site via http://yourwebsite.com/ . Others might also visit your blog via http://www.yourwebsite.com/ . Until today search engines might have seen these addresses as two different sites and thus your link popularity might have been split into half.

The new link tag Google, Yahoo, and Live.com introduced will help fight exactly these problems. Let’s look at another example to make it even clearer. Say you have a website with lots of products on it and the link to the product page looks like this one:

http://yourwebsite.com/product.php

Now when you look at fish as a product its URL might be the following one:

http://yourwebsite.com/product.php?item=fish

As you look around your page and search through the different categories you find a link back to your fish products.

http://yourwebsite.com/product.php?item=fish&id=101&type=food

This link refers you to the exact same page but through a different URL. Now to avoid this being taken as duplicate content you could just add the link tag to your page header:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://yourwebsite.com/product.php?item=fish" />

This simply specifies your preferred version and will keep search engines from mistaken your two URLs referring to the same content as duplicate content.

If you want to add this link tag to every page Joost from Yoast.com has already created a plug in that does exactly that.

I actually found out about this by one of these malicious bloggers visiting my site. The issue the person exploited revolves around the use of the “Top Commentators” plug-in. A lot of people have been using it on their blog to show appreciation towards bloggers commenting often.

Reason for My Research

Let’s first take a look at how I found out about it. I actually took a look at my blog stats and saw that one visitor searched for the following: inurl:organic seo “top commentators”

The Investigation

There are a few things you can take from this. First of all the visitor searched something very specific. What is inurl:organic seo? inurl is a specific Google operator. Google operators are there to modify your search and make it more accurate. For example you could use filetype:log inurl:icq to find .log files that contain the word icq. You can find a list of Google operators here.

Let’s go back to what the visitor was searching for. Because of our knowledge we can now assume that he was looking at web pages containing the keywords organic and seo. But he was further trying to find web sites that also included the exact words “top commentators”. We can assume that he was looking for blogs using the top commentators plugin.

It is also important to know that the visitor left a comment on my blog saying something like: seo refers to search engine optimization. I also visited his site and it was about search engine optimization.

Because I still wasn’t sure what the visitor was actually looking for I queried Google for the same search as the person visiting. These are the results.

If you visit some of these websites you will realize that our theory was right. All pages are related to SEO and include the Top Commentators plug-in. The question why the visitor searched for these web sites still wasn’t clear. After looking at the source code of the Top Commentators plug-in on one website it became clear to me.

Do you see it?

The Trick

There is no rel=”nofollow” which means that the commentators gain part of the PageRank of this web site. I am certain that this was what the visitor was trying to find. He was increasing his PageRank through writing a comment that led him to being listed in the Top Commentators list.

Most of these blog owners probably do not even know that rel=”nofollow” is not activated in the plug-in. The reason for this is that the plug-in by default has nofollow turned off.

The Solution

If you want to add rel=”nofollow” to the Top Commentators plug-in just go into your administration section of WordPress. Click on Appearance -> Widgets and select the sidebar to which you have added the Top Commentators plug-in. There click Edit on the Top Commentators widget and set NoFollow each name if hyperlinked? to Yes. Then just save the changes and you are done

Feel free to ask me any questions. Do you want to know more about how to use Google operators?

This is one of the reasons why there exists a market for being better ranked on search engines. Search Engine Optimization is the industry focusing on receiving better listings for certain keywords. But how do you jump up to the first place on Google?

There are multiple ways you can achieve this but I am going to show you one not well-known technique.

Just Wait

It is that simple. Wait and over time you will see your rank increase. It is the same with how search engines rank your website. The older it is the better the placement. It is exactly the same way with articles. If you create a post, publish it and include the appropriate meta tags then over time you will see your post being better ranked.

I actually found out about this using Rank Checker from SEO Book. Rank Checker is a Firefox extension that lets you enter a name of a website and the keywords you want it to rank for. It then queries the search engines to see on which place your articles appear and lists them. It only includes results from MSN, Google, and Yahoo though.

Have you already known about this? Is this helpful?

Why Are Headlines Important?

Search engines pay a lot of attention to headlines to rank your page accordingly. Also note that the headline is the first thing a reader looks at when deciding whether to read your article, and it is also probably the last thing.

Include Headline in Post Page Title
Purpose: Increase Search Engine Traffic
One of the things that you need to make sure is that your post title is included in the actual post page title. This means that if you are on your post page the article title should appear at the very top of your browser.

Capitalize the First Letter of Words
Purpose: Increase Page Views
Another aspect of the headline to pay attention to is to capitalize the first letter of all the words included in the post title. This makes them stand out from the rest of the content. Also note that you should not capitalize link words such as to, and, or etc. Why should you do that? To give more attention to the more important words. Further do not capitalize your whole post title since that makes it look like spam.

Include Keywords
Purpose: Increase Search Engine Traffic
It is also very important to include keywords in your headlines. Let’s take a look at this via an example. Why did I choose Tips for Entrecarders as the title of one of my posts? First of all this headline includes two keywords which are tips and entrecarders. When further examining this you will notice that I used entrecarders as a keyword because it includes two other keywords (i.e. entrecard and entrecarder).

Do Duplicate Content Penalties Exist?

Yes and No! No because there are usually no penalties for duplicate content in the way people mean it when they talk about it. Yes because if you spread the same content under different domains there probably will be penalties. To put in the words of the Google blogging team:

Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. This means that:

• You typically don’t need to submit a reconsideration request when you’re cleaning up innocently duplicated content.
• If you’re a webmaster of beginner-to-intermediate savviness, you probably don’t need to put too much energy into worrying about duplicate content, since most search engines have ways of handling it.

Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties

It is pretty simple to avoid these penalties. The first step is to not copy other people’s content to your web site. Also if you want to play it safe then just add this code to the header of your WordPress theme:
<?php if(is_archive()){ ?><meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”><?php } ?>
This will stop web crawlers from indexing your archive pages.

If you are still not sure about duplicate content then read the post from Google’s Webmaster Blog.

I am sorry that I’ve been not posting articles lately but I am working on a new website layout and this takes up a whole lot of time. I am probably done in one or two days .