Friday, April 10, 2009

Ok To Make Money Online – Creating a Sitemap

Increase your ability to get indexed faster in this article of OK to Make Money Online.

1st Step: Assuming you are using Blogger let’s get started.


Now log yourself into Google’s Sitemap page. Just under the title Dashboard you will find Add Site. Type in your site URL name in the space provided.

Note of Caution: During the process I my OK to Make Money Online site with "www". Later when getting the Sitemap from Blogger, Google gave me errors back. It seems that the Sitemap generated by Blogger did not need a ‘www’ prefix. I had to go back and submit another site without the “www” prefix.

To check your site information in the atom.xml (Sitemap file) type in http://your.blog.blogspot.com/atom.xml into I.E. using your URL name of course.

OK to Make Money Online - Verfication

If you hover over the first title "OK Make Money Online" displayed in blue you will see at the bottom, when using “IE”, the URL for the title. If there is no “www” then enter your URL with no prefix.

Go back to Google's Sitemap page and click the OK button. Google will tell you the site has been added. In my case "OK to Make Money Online" was added.

2nd Step: Verify your ownership of blog. Google want you to verify that you own this blog. Press the word ‘Verified?’. This will take you to the “Verify a Site” page. You should see your URL site name just below the title line "OK Make Money Online" and a Box that says looks like:

OK to Make Money Online - Meta Tag

Choose the verification method; Using Blogger the only choice you have is using a Meta tag below:



Go to Blogger and sign in to your account. Click on the “Layout” tab in the upper left corner. Then click on the “Edit HTML” tab. Scroll down from the Top and find the "head" tag. Copy and Paste the text from Google’s Meta tag window just after the "head" tag.

OK to Make Money Online - Edit template

Press the SAVE TEMPLATE button. You may sign out if you want but you don’t need to.

Returning to Google’s “Verify a Site” page. Click the “Verify” button. You should now see the Overview Page with your URL listed at the top.

3rd Step: Adding the Sitemap.

Now that Step 2 is complete we need to provide Google with a Sitemap in my case for "OK to Make Money Online". This will help Google when you republish a page, add more articles, archive pages, etc.

Click the Sitemaps button on the left side of the Overview page.
You will now be in the Sitemaps page and your URL should be listed under the title.

On your right should be a place to input text and button Submit Sitemap, enter the text “/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated” in the field and press the Submit Sitemap button. Google will give you a confirmation message and display the following:



It will take a couple of hours to crawl your site and there is not guarantee that Google will list it. But be patient it does take time. My blog "OK to Make Money Online" was verified in a few hours.

BigBear



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Thursday, April 9, 2009

Ok To Make Money Online – Sitemap Checklist

On It' Ok to Make Money Online Sitemap Checklist we will cover a few problems that I have encountered.

During Step 3 in my post of OK to Make Money Creating a Sitemap I originally input "Atom.xml" when I did the Submit Sitemap.



I had received the information for other sites, the information in not correct. The second part of my confusion was the error messages provided by Google, they provide no information on how to fix the problem. Google just informed me I had errors. So where do you go when you have errors and no answers, Webmaster Help Forum.


BigBear

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

OK to Make Money Online – How to Get Indexed

In this article of OK to Make Money online we will cover getting you indexed.

After setting up your account you need to get some traffic. No one at this point knows where your Blog is, so we need some way to tell them. This is where Google come in to play. Google’s bots search the internet daily for new information and updates to information they already have. One of the main tasks of the bots is to index the pages and archives available on the internet. We need to get your new blog indexed. After you have polished up your Blog and have signed up with Adsense let’s improve your chances of getting indexed.


If you have not setup your Adsense account yet then have a look at “OK to Make Money Online – Adsense”, else log in to your account.

Select “Resources” tab, then “Webmaster guidelines” tab. You should notice below the title “When your site is ready” you will see http://www.google.com/addurl.html, select the text and hit return.

You should be at Google’s “Add your URL to Google” page. Using your URL enter it in the space provided, using this URL I entered http://oktomakemoneyonline.blogspot.com. It is wise to enter a comment with your keyword even though Google says it doesn’t matter, maybe not today but who knows in the future. Enter the verification text that us shown in squiggly letters, select the Add URL button and hit return.

After correctly entering the squiggly letters Google will send a confirmation message. That’s it!

To increase your odds of being indexed I will cover how to create a Sitemap for your Blogger account in OK to Make Money Online – Creating a Sitemap

BigBear

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Sunday, April 5, 2009

OK to Make Money Online - Adsense

In this Article of OK to Make Money Online will take a look at how to setup your account with Adsense.

What is Adsense? Adsense is a division of Google that is in charge of controlling the placement and type of ad displayed on a web page, be it a website or a Blog. The placement or location of the ad will be determinate by you. To some extent the type of ad will be under your control but how you control it will depend on the content of your blog. The more targeted your Blog the more targeted you ads will be. If you loosely define the purpose of your blog your ads will also reflect this. For example if your Blog is on snow skiing and you generally write articles about everything including the weather conditions at your favorite skiing location you will get general ads.

On the other hand, if you focus your Blog on snow skiing equipment for the aggressive downhill skier and more specifically the best skies, boots, and poles you will get better and more targeted ads.. Then the people placing the ads will want space on your Blog and the more popular your blog is the better.

Now both Blogs will make money online but the one with the more targeted Blog will get the performance ads and the performance ads pay better than the general ad even when the general ads have a higher CTR (click through rate) then the targeted ads. In another article about of it’s ok to make money online we will cover, poor conversion, poorly optimized page, poorly optimized traffic, smart pricing and low CTR.

For now lets get you Adsense account setup and start the process. So how does this all work? First we need to sign up with Google’s Adsense team and second we need to place Adsense html code in the Gagets on you blog. Go to Google’s Adsense web page at http//Adsense.com and enter your Blog’s URL, select English for Website Language. Make sure to check the “I will not place” boxes before moving to the next selection.


Now complete the Contact information. If you select business instead of individual make sure you have a registered business with a legal DBA and a Federal Tax ID number.



Before hitting the Select Button you must check and agree with the last three boxes above the Submit Button.

The next page will be Google’s confirmation page, check the information before continuing. You will be asked for your Google Account if you don’t have one don’t worry you can set one up from this page just follow the directions.


Enter your Google Email address and Password. This will complete your Adsense application and the next screen will be a confirmation screen and a notice that it will take Google 1-2 days to review your application.


In our next article of OK to Make Money Online well will cover the placement of the Adsense ad boxes in your Blog.


BigBear

Saturday, April 4, 2009

OK to Make Money Online - Setup

Let’s install and setup a Blog in It’s OK to Make Money Online.


Google's Blogger is simple to use, and requires no experience, just sign-up at Blogger with a valid email account. Wordpress is also free but has more bells and whistles than Blogger. It also requires a little more knowledge; you can download it at Wordpress.

Note: Blogs created with WordPress requires WARP and/or a domain, host site, or a website.

Let’s hold off installing your blog till a little later, we need to cover a few initial details about markets and keywords.

A market is what you write about, like farming. What you choose to focus on is your niche, like profitable crops.

With this in mind let's use Google to find you a set of keywords. Enter your keyword or phase in Google, mine is “Make Money Online”, yours could be “profitable farming crops”. Google found 210,000,000 hits using “Make Money Online”.

A well-defined market to be sure and a lot of labor to get to the top of Google’s search engine results page (SERP). Not saying this can’t be done but why fight an up hill battle, better to find that less traveled ground.


Changing the search and add a word or two for “OK to Make Money Online”. This search returned 33,200,000 hits, but still too many. It’s best to start with a niche that has less than one million hits. Check to see if it has a high concentration of paid ads on top three lines and multiple ads on the right side. This may be a great market.

Doing it this way should move you toward the top of a SERP for your niche market. Remember don’t target a niche too small or there won’t be enough traffic to support the number of click throughs to make it profitable

With keywords in hand, you need to pick a blog name or a domain name using the keywords. So if I am using “Ok to Make Money Online” then a URL of www.oktomakemoneyonline.blogspot.com would work and in fact does. This is my URL for Blogger.

Ok so let’s try your new URL name with your keyword.
Go to Google and type in; www.oktomakemoneyonline.blogspot.com. If it returns: Your search - www.oktomakemoneyonline.blogspot.com - did not match any documents, you are good to go. If it does return a match then reverse the wording, add a few dashes.
Just make sure your keywords as in the URL you select.


It’s key to remember, you must have a keyword in your Blog, URL or Domain name. Targeting you keywords will help raise you in the SERPs. Don’t forget a keyword in the blog title and the first and last line of your article. It’s a good practice to scattered some though the article. In this example we are using Make Money Online where I am using Bold to highlight it to the search bot.

Warning: don’t over-use your keywords! Google does not like to see more than 6-7 keywords per one hundred words. Google will consider this spamming if you use keywords too often.

Blogger set-up directions can be found at: Blogger Setup.

WordPress set-up directions are a little more complicated: WordPress Setup.

Your first article could be your “About” article. You will not need too many keywords but it’s good to put 1-2% in the article. The next article should be your Private Statement, don’t forget your keyword usage.

Write your article using keywords in the first line of the first paragraph. Don’t over due it but use another 2%-3% of keywords in the main body, but don’t exceed this or you make stay in the sandbox.

The main body must have a reference to an external source to corroborate your subject. One or two is fine. These are considered forward links. In a later article of OK to Make Money Online I will explain what back links are and why you need them.

Make sure your readers leave with something, I.E. a thought ,a new rule or a new way to look at your niche. Also leave a teaser or two for your next article. Don’t give your readers short articles, they may not return.

Google thinks along similar lines. Articles that are short give little information. They will need to be dynamic and should not be static, or the article page rating will decline, and later fall off page one.

When your article has good content, and is informative, even though it is static you are likely to stay on page one. The general belief is that when Goggle categorizes the article a targeted article gives it a superior page ranking.

The next Article in OK to Make Money Online will look at Getting you Indexed.


BigBear