Yet Another Blog About Blogging
From the category archives:
I just had a hit from Google where my Whisky Rating blog was ranked #2 on page 1 for a search of “whisky” on Google.uk. And this without special SOE tweaking, just by offering good content on a regular basis. I have the Meta SEO plugin for Wordpress installed, though. Gotta love Wordpress!
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The nice thing about submitting your site to MyLinkState to sell text links is that all for your posts, pages, categories and tags the Google pagerank is displayed.
I made an interesting observation: My Whisky Rating Blog has just received PR 3. I was astonished to find out that some of my categories were PR 2 and some were PR 0. They all have no external backlinks! But I noticed that the PR 2 categories are more likely to be targets from search engine traffic.
I can draw only one conclusion from this: In their pagerank formula, Google weighs in the the amount of klicks on search pages, regardless of thir SERPs. Perhaps also the bounce rate is another factor. Here is an example for two distillery categories:
Just a few clicks made the difference as it seems. Or does anybody have another explanation for this phenomenon?
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Selling text links has become a bit of a two sided coin for bloggers. In the good old days you could earn a steady income from them regardless of your traffic provided you had a decent enough pagerank. But now Google will punish sites selling text links without “nofollow” attribute by reducing their pagerank in order to make selling links less attractive.
But now, a German advertising broker called MyLinkState has invented a system that can beat this unpleasant practice. They recently introduced a proprietary ranking system that is based upon how well a page ranks in Google search results for their database of 300,000 keywords. They call it MLS Rank and advertisers are presented with the choice of booking a text link based on the pagerank or the MLS rank. Just as Google does with their pagerank, they use a logarithmic scale to make the ranks comparable. Booking a MLS rank x link costs the same as a pagerank x link.
Another nice feature for us publishers is that all pages, categories and tags of a blog are spidered and will be offered separatly to the advertisers. So links are booked on a per page basis. With a maximum of three links per page, it is theoretically possible to gernerate quite a bit of income this way.
The site is open to international customers, you can choose German or English as a language for your site and advertising. So far I have only sold links on my German blogs, but I also just registered my whisky blog which is written in English. I will keep you updated how the bookings for this site will evolve, as I am sure this will be of interest for international bloggers.
MyLinkState uses a point system for buying and selling links. 1000 points are worth EUR 0.60 or $0.87 at the current exchange rate. Earnings are paid out via Paypal if you have accumulated more than EUR 50.
Approximate earnings per link per month (from my own experience):
I don’t know if the points kepp doubling with higher ranks, so I won’t promise anything here.
This new ranking system has only recently been introduced, and so far most of my bookings were by pagerank. But today I sold two 9000 point links on PR 0 pages because they had a MLS rank of 4! This is what prompted me to write this article.
Everybody who knows a little bit about SEO will notice that with this proprietary ranking system you don’t have to care anymore about being punished by Google for selling text links, provided your pages rank well enough in Google searches.
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Many hobby bloggers are unaware of what is under the hood in search engines. They happily type away their articles, maybe decorated by some Adsense blocks and wait for visitors to read and click the ads. At the end of the day they look at their stats and wonder why almost nobody popped in.
Even if you are not keen on high advertising revenues; when you have a blog you want to have someone to read your articles. After all, there undoubtedly is a certain amount of exhibitionism involved in blogging. So you better take measures that your blog is not just another little critter in that giant ant colony that is usually called Blogosphere.
Making yourself more prominent on the net is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Basically, this means tweaking your blog in such a way that you rank higher in the result lists of search engines. If done properly, not only search engnie traffic will increase, but also traffic from other sources.
SEO can be broken down into two main elements:
Search engines let people search for keywords. So you have to make sure that you use keywords that are relevant to your blog as often as possible in your writing.
The better you play the keyword play, the higher you will rank in the search engines.
Another important factor in how well you are liked by search engines is the number of backlinks you have, this means sites linking to your blog.
Building up a link network takes time, as you can only control part of the process. Here are just a few things you can do:
The more sites link to you, the higher you will rank in search results. And you will also benefit from people clicking on the links you have left. Perhaps other bloggers will add you to their blogroll, if they like what you write.
This was by no means intended to be an in-depth introduction to SEO, just a quick overview for beginners to get familiar with the term. Fancy things like PageRank or TrustRank were deliberately skipped to keep it as simple as possible.
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