The Dragon King

Directory submission is one important part of link building. Literally, thousands of website directories are available for website owners to list their websites. Some directories are free for submission; some are free but require a reciprocal link from your site; some directories charge an one-time fee for permanent listing; others charge an annual fee for the listing. Some directories list websites only in a specific niche, industry, or region.

To what kind of directories should you submit your sites? We think the directories to which you submit your websites should have the following qualities:

Free – Many directories charge you to be listed.  Some of them charge a very low fee, but if you want to submit to hundreds of directories, the total cost could be pretty high.  Plenty of web directories are free for listing and many of them have high PR.  Stay with the free web directories, it saves your money and time.

No reciprocal link required – You should limit your outgoing links only to sites with relevant content.  In addition, adding hundreds of reciprocal links is very time consuming.  One benefit of adding reciprocal links to your site for directory submission is that your sites will be listed in a higher percentage and in shorter period of time.

No account creation required – Again, you don’t have time for this procedure. You don’t need to revisit and modify the submission most of the time. Why bother?

Several websites lists web directories which meet some of above mentioned criteria. Be aware, though, that things keep changing. Many directory sites start off free without requiring a reciprocal link and account creation.  Later, though, when they get more popular, they add fees or other requirements.

• VileSilencer

This is a well-updated list of over 500 free directories.

• One Way Text Link - Free Directory List

This most complete list of free directories includes over 2400 directories ordered by Google page rank. You can use this website to track your directory submission progress for free.

• SEO Company - Free Directory List

This list, which includes 268 directories, is supposed to be a list of free directories, but many of the directories do charge a fee or require a reciprocal link.

• Strongest Links

This directory includes paid and free directories. You can, however, sort the table based on “fee” or “free?” and generate a list of free directories. This list provides not only PR but also Alexa  number and saturation information.

Tags: Link Building // Add Comment »

To improve your Adsense income, you need to optimize your page content. You also need to tweak your Adsense ads location, format, color, etc., to achieve satisfied CTR and ECPM. To do this, you need some tools to track the Adsense performance in various situations. Google does provide some basic information such as page impressions, clicks, CTR, eCPM, and earnings. Google also provides “channel” to help tracking the ad performance.

Yet many AdSense publishers feel the need for more information than they can get through the AdSense account. Using supplementary click tracking tools can help you complete the image of your AdSense ads performance. What do these click trackers offer you that Google’s channels don’t?

• They allow you to manage the sources of traffic — tracking where visitors come from (referrer domain) and comparing performance for various traffic sources. Thus you can make improvements to increase traffic from the effective sources. For example, if you get a better CTR from visitors coming to your page through Yahoo SE than from those coming through Google, then you’ll focus on SE optimizations for Yahoo.
• They let you know what keywords were searched for if the visitor found your page via a search engine.
• Some Adsense tracking tools permit you to monitor activity on each ad (Adsense channels don’t offer this, they just register clicks per ad unit).
You should constantly monitor your AdSense site using AdSense tracking tools in conjunction with Google AdSense channel. Here are some click tracking tools available online:

Site Super Tracker (SST)

Site Super Tracker is the newest product on the market to help you analyze the traffic and track clicks on your sites. SST shows you the sources of visitors, referring IPs, ads clicked on, ad format, etc., in a serious of reports and graphs. One really neat and unique feature is the Heatmap Report, which shows you an actual visual representation of where your visitors are clicking on your pages.
SST works not only with Adsense, but also with some other popular advertising products, such as the following:

• Adsense
• AdLinks
• Yahoo Publisher Network
• PeelAwayAds
• AuctionAds

One installation is capable of tracking all of your domains and their subdirectories so you need to install this only once to track your whole online empire.

Cost: $67

For more information, check Site Super Tracker.

AsRep Google AdSense Tracking Script

AsRep shows details that Google does not provide, such as the referring pages, the visitor IPs and countries, the ad unit channels, the colors and formats, etc. It tracks Adsense clicks up to three ad units, three ad link unit, and two search boxes per page. It can email the reports periodically. AsRep is available in PHP and Perl. Features: Report the performance of your domains and individual pages; find the performance of all pages under a directory; report the performance of the Google Channels in real-time; discover your best referring sites in terms of impressions and AdSense clicks; learn which pages are sending you visitors and how many of them are clicking to AdSense. Unfortunately, it cannot track Adsense performance at the individual ad level. It goes to the level of ad units.

Cost: Free trial version with limited function/$50

ClickAider

Easy to use free analysis tool, implemented for your site with a snippet of JavaScript code at the bottom of the pages. “Clickaider is a Web statistics system which is designed to track clicks on advertisements and links. Unlike most systems out there, this system is designed for Publishers to help them to understand their traffic and maximize web site monetization.” Access your stats online 24/7 via your Clickaider account. The drawback is that it cannot track the specific ad clicked.

Cost: Free.

MyBlogLog

When you log into your stats page, you can see how many clicks there were on different ad units (classified by ad sizes) and, if you click the “view” link, it will show you from which page on your blog the clicks have come (and how many clicks each page had). MyBlogLog is now part of Yahoo family. You can use your Yahoo ID to login.

Tags: Tools and Software, adsense // Add Comment »

Almost all major search engines treat link popularity (i.e. the number and the quality of links that point to your website) as a very important factor in ranking your web pages. The best links are one-way links from high PR site in the same or closely related niches. Link building is a very important but also a time-consuming task. Some websites offer link exchange services which can speed up your link building process.

Link2Me

Their system is very easy to use. We have successfully exchanged many links through their system. They claim there are almost 30,000 websites in their directory; therefore, it is easy to find many relevant sites to link with. Their paid service costs $29.95 annually. They provide free services limited to 5 link requests per day.

SimplyLinking.com

The free services allow 20 link requests per day.  This is enough for owners with only a few sites. But the functions of free service are very limited. It is hard to search the directory.

In the long run, one-way links from quality sites in the same or closely related niches are preferred. You should use various link-building methods to generate these blacklinks. These are just some online link-exchange services you can use to supplement your overall link-building campaign. Be careful when you use automatic reciprocal link-exchange services. Most of the backlinks provided by these services are irrelevant. If you link to some “bad” sites, your sites may be penalized by search engines.

Tags: Link Building // Add Comment »

Adsense revenue sharing is a good way for internet marketers or freelance writers to earn extra income by taking part in the community on other web sites. Often the Adsense revenue shared is between 50 and 100 percent for the content that you add to the specific revenue-sharing site. The content could be in the form of a thread you start or a follow-up post in a forum, an article submitted to an article site, a video or picture, a post in a blog, or other types of content.

If you are a good and quick writer but don’t have skills or experience to develop and optimize your own websites or blogs and to generate enough traffic, Adsense revenue sharing could be an easy and quick way to make some extra income. This is especially good for anyone who likes to write articles or to make some interesting videos, pictures, etc.

What sites have the Adsense revenue-sharing program? Admoolah has compiled such a list and a brief introduction for some major sites. Reviewer of Sites also provides a list of Adsense revenue-sharing sites which are organized into more categories.  For most of the sites, the percentage of revenue sharing is also provided. Most of the sites in these two lists are different.

Before you hand over your Adsense ID, you need to investigate thoroughly the sites where you are going to do the revenue sharing. The site has to comply with Google TOS. You don’t want to associate with a “bad” site based on Google’s definition,;otherwise, your Google Adsense account could be in jeopardy.

Tags: adsense // Add Comment »

If you are a web publisher using Adsense as monetization method, you may be frustrated by low-paying ads showing on your websites or blogs. Many times when you check your Adsense account, you find some clicks only getting 0.01$-0.03$ per click. What are those ads? These are Adword ads from MFA (Made for Adsense) or LCPC (Low Cost Per Click) sites.

What can you do about it? Well, the first thing you should do is work on keyword research. Then create content based on those high-paying keywords and do SEO on the pages. If you do it right, your site should attract more higher paying ads. You can reduce but cannot completely eliminate those low-paying ads. There is a feature in your Adsense account called “Competitive Ad Filter”, which was originally designed to block your competitors’ ads. You can use this feature to block low-paying ads, too.

How do you know what kind of sites are MFA or LCPC sites? MFA sites are easier to identify. If you visit an advertiser’s site (by using the Adsense Preview tool or directly entering the URL in the address bar, but Do Not Click on Your Own Ads) and see the site filled with bunch of links and ads (not necessarily Google ads) without real content, it is a MFA site. It is much harder to find LCPC sites. You need to install an Adsense tracking tool to track the clicks and compare your payment in your Adsense account. You may need the Adsense channel to help this task. If you run a high traffic site and get a lot of clicks, it is not easy to figure out the payment for a specific click.

For web publishers who don’t want to go through all the trouble of finding the MFA or LCPC sites by themselves, you can use the service provided by AdsBlackList.com for free (basic account) or for a small monthly fee (premier or premier + account). This site generates a list of blacklist URLs based on the site URL and set of keywords that you provide. You can then copy & paste these URL list into your Google AdSense competitive ad filter. Is this service useful? Some publishers reported significant increase of Adsense revenue, but it makes no difference for others. It is your judgment call. I tried the free service with the basic account. I compared the 200 sites generated by AdBlackList with the ads shown on my sites. There was no overlap.

Tags: adsense // Add Comment »