4 Steps To Flip a Website Successfully

Determining a profitable website is not easy especially if you are looking to flip it for higher profit within a short time frame. However, with the correct steps and procedures, it is possible even for a beginner to pick up a good site with great potential to start off.

The first step to determine if a website is worth the investment is by the number of income streams it has. Most websites have more than one income channel such as Pay-Per-Click advertisement (Google Adsense etc), Pay-Per-Action programs (AzoogleAds, ClickBank etc) or selling of own products. Basically, this step is to analyze the current profitable channels and see if you can expand or add in other sources of income. Never rely only on one income source for a website.

The second step is to find out where are the traffic coming from. Most websites should have a healthy amount of constant traffic from the search engines followed by social bookmarking sites or regular visitors. If the majority of the traffic is coming from the search engines, proceed to ask the owner what are the keywords that brought in the traffic. Try out the keywords in the search engines and check out the search engine rankings of the site.

You should also check with the owner what are the top search engines that direct the traffic to the site. With these information, check the on-page optimization effort of the site and you may have more ideas for improvements after you have bought it.

The next step is to highlight the areas of possible improvements of the site. If you can come out with at least two quick fixes to the site that can increase the value created to the visitors, the traffic to the site will increase to the next higher level eventually. For example, if you can include an online tool to calculate the financial networth of a person in a financial blog, that would most likely benefit all your readers in a long run.

The fourth step is to check for back links to the site that you are interested to purchase. It is highly recommended to use Yahoo backlink analyzer to check for backlinks since it displays almost all the pages that linked to the site. You may want to use the Yahoo powered analyzer at USESEO.com.

With the above four steps, you should have no problems choosing a profitable website that can generate a stable income for some time. You are advised to check on the seller’s history as well to know more about the seller’s background before confirming the transaction.

KC has been flipping websites for great profit and is also the author of the eBook that teaches how to sell a brand new site for great profit. KC also runs a health and life insurance website and he highly recommends the use of the Yahoo powered Backlink Analyzer before buying any websites.

How Search Engines Work: Crawling + Indexing

A search engine operates, in the following order: 1) Crawling; 2) Deep Crawling Depth-first search (DFS); 3) Fresh Crawling Breadth-first search (BFS); 4) Indexing; 5) Searching.

Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler (also known as a spider) ?” an automated web browser which follows every link it sees, exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed. Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas some store every word of every page it finds, such as AltaVista. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it.

This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google’s handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned web page. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

When a user comes to the search engine and makes a query, typically by giving keywords, the engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document’s title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean terms AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. An advanced feature is proximity search, which allows you to define the distance between keywords.

The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back. While there may be millions of Web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the “best” results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.

Most web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the controversial practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results.

The vast majority of search engines are run by private companies using proprietary algorithms and closed databases, the most popular currently being Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo! Search. However, Open source search engine technology does exist, such as Dig, Nutch, Senas, Egothor, OpenFTS, DataparkSearch, and many others.

David and his team developed Article Post Robot, http://www.articlepostrobot.com, the software which can post articles to hundreds of article sites and mail lists automatically. Demo is available upon request at help at => articlepostrobot.com

How to Design an Adwords Campaign that Works

Setting up an Adwords campaign is easy isn??t it? You bid on your chosen key words and the visitors will come rolling in. Well it??s not quite like that and its all because of the fiendish way Google decides when and at what position to display your ad.

Your ad is ranked on search results and content pages based on various performance factors, including maximum cost-per-click (CPC), clickthrough rate (CTR), and the relevance of your ad text to the keyword you have chosen to sponsor. The name of the game is to write relevant ad text, have a high CPC and a strong CTR.

How do you achieve all this? The answer is structure. The Adwords service has a strict hierarchy. First up you will need to set up an account, each account can be divided into campaigns and each campaign has at least one Ad Group. The Ad Group contains the keywords and is associated with the actual advertising placement.

The maximum CPC is similar to the bid on Overture and it is directly related to your available budget and can be set for individual keywords or automatically budget optimised across a whole campaign.

The CTR of your ads depends entirely on how well you write the ad copy. Using the keyword prominently is a good idea. If you??re looking for ??blue widgets? then you??re more likely to click an ad with ??blue widgets? in the title and ad copy than one mentioning ??red widgets?. Having a strong call to action is also a good idea so go for words like ??get?, ??buy?, ??order? and ??purchase?. The third part of the equation is relevancy which means that your copy needs to relevant to the keyword and here??s where the structure comes in.

You need to group your keywords in closely themed ad groups so that you can write relevant text. It would be difficult to write relevant text for blue widgets and red widgets so set up different ad groups one for blue widgets and one for red ones. If you end up with 50 Ad Groups with one or two keywords only don??t worry. This might seem like a lot of work to start with but it will make you life a whole lot easier in the long run because the structure gives you control.

At campaign level you can target Ad Groups to geographical regions so if you??re products are called widgets in the UK and something else in the US. Don??t panic! You can set up a campaign called ??Widgets US? and create Ad Groups based around US terminology.

You should also take a look at keyword matching. If you want to advertise on the phrase ??French lessons? you probably don??t want to display ads or get click throughs from people looking for ??French polishing lessons?. You can handle this by adding negative matching on the word ??polishing? so you ad group would contain the keywords ??French lessons? and ??-polishing?. This action will reduce your ad impressions but increase your CTR and ranking and save you cash. Use the Google Keyword Tool to identify possible negative keywords they??ll always be pretty obvious and sometimes surprising too!

Now with the structure in place you can activate the campaign and see what happens. You??re going to have to manage the campaign quite closely at first but pretty quickly you??ll see which ad groups are performing. When you find an ad group that has low CTR change the text or even better create a new ad group containing the same keywords. Then write some new text taking a look at your competition for tips,. Running two parallel ad groups will allow you to objectively identify the ad placements that work best for your campaign.

Jim Williams
Managing Director
Web Strategy Consultancy
JU2
http://www.ju2.com
http://www.ju2blog.com

Search Engine Friendly is NOT Search Engine Optimized

When we are quoting development work for prospective clients we are often asked to develop a website that is search engine optimized. This usually brings me into a long-winded explanation on how developing a website to be search engine friendly is not the same thing as optimizing that website for search performance. Kind of like how building a car is not the same as making it ready to compete in the Indy 500. Those are two different tasks altogether.

Let me explain.

The SEO provider or consultant should be involved in the website development process, though those two roles are completely different. The developer designs and creates the front and back end of the website. A good developer can do that job well, but mostly they do it to function for the user, not perform for the search engines. The SEO should be involved to ensure that what the developer produces is as search engine friendly as possible.

Most web design and development companies don’t know the first thing about SEO or creating SE friendly websites. And most who claim to be are liars. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

Hint: If your web developer says they will SEO your website for you as part of the one-time design fee, they are a liar. If they tell you they’ll develop a search engine friendly or SEO ready site then there is a better chance they know what they are talking about.

Let me be clear: Designing or programming a search engine optimized website simply cannot be done. Designing or programming a search engine friendly site can.

Design/development and SEO are two completely different things, though closely tied together. Each, however, requires a completely different skill set. Most SEOs don’t claim to be web developers (though some are), but oddly, many web designers claim to be able to SEO (though most can’t.)

The process of SEO requires hours of additional research and a skill set that usually is not included as a part of the site development contract. There are a few development firms that also specialize in SEO and Marketing and these firms can develop and engage in long-term optimization services. But be aware that any short-term website development contract that claims to include SEO simply will not provide adequate or successful SEO marketing results.

It’s very smart to find a web developer that can create a search engine friendly website, but be aware of claims of SEO services being included. It’s even smart to find an SEO that will work with your web developer to create a search engine friendly website completely compatible with their optimization processes. This prevents the SEO from having to ask for numerous, and expensive, site development changes in order to embark on a successful SEO campaign.

Stoney deGeyter leads a spectacular team of seasoned marketing experts at Pole Position Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing Company. Stoney started PPM in 1998 by finding the brightest minds in the industry and nurturing within them an intense desire to become leaders in their respective fields. With this team of professionals, he has built a wildly successful website marketing company that succeeds through both personal and professional integrity.

You can read Stoney??s blog posts at the E-Marketing Performance blog and more of his work on several well-known SEO and marketing news sources including Search Engine Guide and Web Pro News. Stoney has authored two website marketing books: E-Marketing Performance: Effective strategies for building, optimizing, and marketing your website online and Keyword Research and Selection: The definitive guide to gathering, sorting and organizing your keywords into a high-performance SEO campaign.