Quality Content

In a recent post on the official Google Adsense Blog, Arlene Lee posted about how writing quality content is the surest way to make money using adsense. I thought this would be a good topic to visit because after the thousands of times its been said, there are still people out there that believe publishing ads on multiple sites will work just as well as publishing on one or two blogs with high quality content.

Its important to read and understand Googles Webmaster Guidelines when building your sites. Ensure you have good quality, original content that covers topics you are passionate about. The last thing you want to do is build a blog around something you like for a short period of time. Your site will go nowhere. Keep in mind when your writing your content, your readers want certain things. As best you can gather insight from your readers by tracking what posts they tend to read and which they don’t. Also, use your comments section to find out what your readers are looking for as well.

Measure your success. You can’t only rely on specific traffic numbers to tell you weather you successful. Obviously, its all about making money right? So you may be getting thousands of visitors a day but barely making any money. So measure the results using channels in Adsense. Maybe your ad placement color or size just isn’t right. Using channels will help you determine whats best for your site.

So to make it simple, write quality posts, optimize your ads, and measure the results.

Is Sarah Palin Right For John McCain

I know this isn’t the typical topic I cover here on TheYoungGuy.com, but I feel obligated to speak up about certain things. I have been watching the news all night about the announcement John McCain made to declare Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, to be his Vice Presidential running mate and I still don’t know what to think. I am in a state of shock.

I actually have to agree with Ted Nugent when he stated something to the effect of, “we as a people need to stand up and take our country back.” While its not a direct quote from the Nuge, that was the impression I received and neither John McCain or Barak Obama gives the impression that they will improve the current position our country is in. I believe adding Sarah Palin to the ticket will help John McCain in the sense that she will open eyes and help capture voters that McCain may not have received originally, however this decision could also backfire on him and push voters away with her lack of experience. Who knows at this point?!?

What do you think?

Building Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the keys to ranking well in search engines. Without them, you almost never show up on the first, second, or third page in Google, Yahoo or any other search engine. So what are backlinks? Backlinks are links to your site from other blogs or websites. However its important you understand the difference between a backlink and a quality backlink. Quality backlinks are links that are on related niche sites and carry even more weight if they are on sites that you actually interact on. So every time you comment on someones post and add your website link you gain a backlink.

There are a lot of bloggers out there that try to coax people into “free backlink” programs by promising to add a link to their page if you copy certain text from their page onto yours. I do want to point out something though. As many of you have heard before, even bad advertising is good advertising. So the more you get your name out there they better chance you will have in attracting people to your site but if the link isn’t a quality backlink then you may not receive “credit” from Google when its time to update your Page Rank (PR). Something else you should know too. If you manage to have someone with a higher page rank link to your site, those links will carry more weight than say someone with a lower rank.

Ex. If I were to have my page linked on Garry Conns main page, which carries a Page Rank of 5, that would help me out more than if I were to link to another page with a PR of 3, I would not have the same return on investment so-to-speak.

So don’t get sucked into the scams out there and try to build relationships with other bloggers in your niche. This will allow you to gain credibility in your niche and PR.

All In One SEO Pack

Another great plugin that I use is the All-in-one SEO pack. It is used for SEO automation on your blog. So what is SEO? Search Engine Optimization. What does that mean? According to Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization is “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywoards.”

So what does the All-in-one SEO pack do for you? It will automatically optimize your blog post titles. Generates META tags automatically. Avoids duplicate content and more. Overall it makes your job easier when it comes to improving your chances to be listed in search engines.

Check it out and download here.

*Also, let me point out, this is a Wordpress Plugin.

Cybercoder.net Sold

Popular among a lot of bloggers, Cybercoder.net has now been sold. According to Cybercoder himself, he claims he wants to turn his focus towards other blogs of his such as dcooley.net and musicramble.com and put some distance between himself and his alter ego of Cybercoder. Its a sad day for some of us bloggers, but hopefully the new owner will keep the site alive with similar content and we all know CyberCoder a.k.a David Cooley will continue blogging elsewhere. Check him out on Twitter as dcooley.