Let’s start with the meta description, which is really the most important meta-tag you need to remember. First I want to kill a typical myth about this tag: it does not help your site rank higher. The only purpose for the meta description is to provide at snippet about the current page for Google. Now why is this tag so important? Because it gives you a chance to write 160 characters to get the users attention – this is what differentiates your results from the other results on the page. I have seen several sites having the CTR on search results improve a lot, just by optimizing their meta description.
Another important thing to mention with meta-tags, is that meta keywords is useless; it is out-dated, and no longer used by Google (most likely not by other search engines either). Generating or writing meta-keywords is a waste of time in terms of ranking and SEO, so just skip it. Save the bytes in your HTML for more important tags (like the canonical!).

Now let’s move on to some of the other important HTML tags. First of all you should always remember to use h1, h2, etc. where applicable. If possible also wrap your paragraphs into the p-tag, and in general make sure you follow the W3C guidelines.
A small tip is to take a look at your generated HTML (yes, go to your browser and use the view-source function), and read through your page. Now ask yourself if the page is easy to read? (Is it easy to identify title, content, and other objects?)
If it is easy to read your page as a human, then it is most likely also easy for Google to read and understand. If this is not the case, then you should probably start to work on optimizing your HTML.

To sum up, here is a small check-list when going through your HTML source:

• Always make sure to have unique title-tags (Google only shows 60 characters, but it will read much more than that, so don’t be afraid to have too long title-tags)
• Make sure to create a unique meta-tag description for each page. Never have the same meta-description on all pages.
• Use h1, h2, p, strong, em, and so on to format your text and content. A rule of thumb is that if your HTML is readable for humans, it most likely is readable for Google as well.
• Don’t use meta keywords, it is a waste of time and bytes.

This is part 3 of 5 in my series of Must-Know SEO for Developers. You can find all the parts here.

• Part 1: Avoiding Duplicate Content With 301 Redirects and Canonical Tags
• Part 2: Using Correct URL Structure
• Part 3: Using Correct Meta-tags And Other HTML tags
• Part 4: Internal Linking In Your Web Application
• Part 5: Using Webmaster Tools And Analytics

The main thing to remember with URL’s are to get the keywords in. If you are allowing your users to create dynamic content (fx. CMS pages), make sure to generate the URL string from the title or give the user control of creating a URL.
Another thing Google likes, especially if you have dynamic content and nested categories, is using the URL as a “breadcrumb” structure. A good idea would be to have for example:
/category/subcategory/item
Just remember not to have too long URL’s, and follow the basic rules. Also make sure that nested URL’s like the above are actually related and it is the correct path for the item.
Note: Google is in general really good at understanding breadcrumb structure, but always make it as easy as possible. The above example is both easy to understand for the crawlers and for the human eye.

Another thing to remember when making pretty URL, is that while the robots and browsers in general can read, crawl and understand special signs (fx. ñ in Spanish) it is generally a bad idea to use those in urls. I learned this the hard way, and discover that Google doesn’t encode the url, so if you for example use urlencode()/urldecode() in PHP, you will get different requests from Google and from normal browsers. So remember to always make urls plaintext; no exceptions.

A last thing about URL structure is that you should choose one and stick to that. Make sure that once content has been created, and has an URL (fx. /category/item), they will not change. Make sure that you create the proper 301 redirects if you change the URL structure, and implement the canonical tags as described in the last post.

This is part 2 of 5 in my series of Must-Know SEO for Developers. You can find all the parts here.

• Part 1: Avoiding Duplicate Content With 301 Redirects and Canonical Tags
• Part 2: Using Correct URL Structure
• Part 3: Using Correct Meta-tags And Other HTML tags
• Part 4: Internal Linking In Your Web Application
• Part 5: Using Webmaster Tools And Analytics

• Your “linkjuice” / PageRank-flow is spreading to different pages.
• The Search engines will treat each page as individual and index them as different pages
• In worst case scenario you will get punished and get lower rankings

Duplicate content can be of many variations. Here is a couple of examples:

• www.domain.com and domain.com(could be ANY subdomain like server2.domain.com)
• domain.com/page1 and domain.com/page1/(The trailing slash in the end WILL be seen as different page)
• domain.com/index.php and domain.com/

Luckily for developers, there is many easy ways to fix this. Lately my favourite has been using canonical tags, but you have to be careful with those. 301 redirection is in many cases the best option, and is a MUST if you already have DC problems.
By implementing canonical tag with the full url (fx “http://domain.com/page1”), Google knows that it is the original page, and will stop thinking /page1/ or /page1/?x=y is different pages. But be careful: just a couple of weeks ago, I pushed an update to a site with large amounts of dynamic content. I didn’t notice that I forgot “http://” in my canonical tags, and suddenly I had over 30.000 404 errors in Webmaster Tools, because Google couldn’t find “http://domain.com/domain.com/url”.
Now when shit happens, like in the case above, 301 Redirects is the absolute best way to go. This will pass pagerank on to the original page and redirect both visitors and the crawlers.

So to sum up about Duplicate Content: avoid it. Before it goes wrong. Make sure that all subdomains 301 redirect to your original (or www-version if you use that) – or that you at least have canonical tags implemented. Also make sure to decide if your URL’s should be shown as /content, /content/, /content.html or whatever you prefer. If you do not implement these things your site will most likely get punished. If your competitor is of “evil mind”, and see that you show the same content on all subdomains without canonical tags (common mistake) he can linkbuild to your different URL’s and get your site punished for DC.
(suddenly you might see “looser.domain.com”, “imanass.domain.com” and whatever ranking instead of your original page – that wouldn’t be fun, would it? And worst case scenario, get de-ranking and even de-indexed as punishment for Duplicate Content)

What is your experience with Duplicate Content as a web developer? Do you implement and use 301 Redirects & canonical tags in your projects right from the start? Be sure to leave a comment, and feel free to come with more tips and corrections.

This is part 1 of 5 in my series of Must-Know SEO for Developers. You can find all the parts here.

• Part 1: Avoiding Duplicate Content With 301 Redirects and Canonical Tags
• Part 2: Using Correct URL Structure
• Part 3: Using Correct Meta-tags And Other HTML tags
• Part 4: Internal Linking In Your Web Application
• Part 5: Using Webmaster Tools And Analytics

This is the most basic stuff that can really harm your rankings in search engines like Google. I’ve seen sites drop, get de-index and suddenly triple their visitors from search engines, just based on simple onsite changes. However the worst thing is that many developers out there are basically ruining their clients websites, by not knowing what they do; and implementing potentially harmful codes.
Let’s get on to the list of 5 SEO tips every web application developer must know! Below is links to the different parts of the series.

• Part 1: Avoiding Duplicate Content With 301 Redirects and Canonical Tags
• Part 2: Using Correct URL Structure
• Part 3: Using Correct Meta-tags And Other HTML tags
• Part 4: Internal Linking In Your Web Application
• Part 5: Using Webmaster Tools And Analytics

I am planning to post one part every Monday, with the first part coming next Monday, 5th of September. So stay tuned, and feel free to comment with inspiration, what you think is the most important onsite SEO every web developer should know, and of course if you thing I am wrong, feel free to correct me in the comments.

With SEOSupporter you can easily follow your Google rankings, set up custom reports when you fall or rise in the SERP’s and follow your progress from backlinking to PR changes. I find this the easiest way to keep track of my SEO progress with my websites; and it is very handy when you have a bunch of Sniper sites.

Easy Project Overview

My favorite thing about SEOSupporter (besides that it is a free tool) is the userfriendly interface. It is very easy to get used to, it looks really nice and it gives you a really nice overview over all of your sites. At the dashboard you get a quick overview over all of your sites latest progress; PageRank, Backlinks, Pages Indexed and Alexa ranking. The only thing that is a bit annoying, is the fact that Pages Indexed is not really working. All of my sites are indexed (and ranking) in Google, but SEOSupporter shows 0 indexed pages for most of them. A site search on Google will also show they are indexed, so I’m not completely sure how this function works.

Keyword Ranking and Backlink Progress

The two main features for following your site, is definitely the Keyword Tracking and Backlink overview. If you are doing linkbuilding on of your sites, you can easily follow your progress day by day, and even see how your site has progressed in the past half year.

With the Keyword Monitoring you can also track your competitors ranking on your keywords, a good thing if you are in a competetive niche, and you just want to get that number 1 ranking. Keep track of what your competitors are doing, how many backlinks they have – you might even be able to spot an aggressive linkbuilding attempt of one of your competitors, and (if you act in time) keep your position.

Completely Free SEO Tool

SEOSupporter is currently completely free. It is still in BETA, but the system works (really well), and there is no doubt that if you have a website, and are doing some SEO, you should use this tool. According to the person behind, there will be a paid version of the services at some point, but I am sure that there will always be a free version of the system. So what are you waiting for? Jump over to SEOSupporter and sign up for your own account now!

What does Web History Means for My Rankings?

Before you had to be logged in on Google, to have your Web History affecting the search results, but now it is activated as a default. This means that if you search often on “Spanish Translation”, and always click on the same tool, this will effect the ranking of that website, and maybe next time you search on “Spanish Translation”, the website you always clicks on, will be moving up in the results.
So lets say you are optimizing your website for “Fast Spanish Translation”, and your site is number #2 on Google. You often make the search on Google to check that your website still is number #2, but you also click on your competitors to see if they made any changes their website, or what news they have. You never click on your own website, because you know what is on it. If you have Web History enable, this will now affect your competitors ranking, so your own site might move down in the search results, while your competitors will move up.
Because Google now puts this option ON as standard, this means that most people will not turn it off, and you have even less change of seeing how you actually are ranking in the SERP’s, when your customers are searching for your website or products.

Why Disable Web History?

There are a few reason to disable Web History, and if you own a website and want to check your rankings on Google, you should definitely turn it off right away. You can follow my step-by-step guide to disable it below.
If you work with SEO, got your own website or even managing your own website, it should be clear why you should turn it off; it WILL affect your rankings, so you should also make sure your SEO customers disable this, when checking their rankings in Google. If not, you will most likely end up getting a lot of calls from your customers, asking why they suddenly are moving down in the search results.

Even if you are not working with SEO or run a website, disabling the Web History will make your search results cleaner and you will see more “fresh” results, allowing sites you havent seen before to be in top of the search results too. Follow my step-by-step guide below to Disable Google Web History.

How To Disable Google Web History

To disable the Web History (so it won’t affect the SERP pages you see in Google), start by go making a search on Google, as you on the screenshot below. Make sure you are not logged into any Google application like Gmail, and you will now see a link to “Web History” in the top right corner. Simply click on the link.

You will now see a screen where you can disable the Web History. Simple click on “Disable customizations based on search activity” to disable your Web History.

If you see a screen like on the screenshot below, you have now disable your Web History, and your search results will no longer be affected by what you have clicked on in the past. Now you should only see “clean” SERP’s from Google.

I see this as a bad move from Google, but it is mainly in the light of working with SEO. It will now be harder to check your rankings, make your customer see their true rankings, and it is harder to predict if your will be on top of the search results for the visitors, as the SERP’s now will look much more different depending on which computer you search from. This will also be a big problem on public computers.

What do you think about the Google Personalized Web Results? Is it good or bad that Google now is “forcing” everybody to use it, and activates it as default? Most people searching on Google will probably never now about the Web History, and therefore never disable it. Feel free to throw a comment below the post.

I did see an improvement in hops both for Clickbank and Amazon, and I made a small Amazon sale. Somebody who clicked on my link decided to buy some CD, but this isn’t really anything to talk about as I only earned $0,56 on that.

As you can see, I have diveded the sites into CB Snipers and AdSense sites. Generally I am dissappointed about the whole Clickbank sniper concept, but I havent given completely up on these sites. When time comes, I’d like to work som my on backlinking for them, and maybe add some UAW articles to generate backlinks over time. Site #14 just wont rank for the keyword, but I havent really done any linkbuilding – not even a Ezine yet, but it is indexed, so maybe it was just bad keyword research. Site #13 is more of a long term project, and I’d like to add some 20-25 articles to it in december and do some link building, more as a test to see if I can actually get it to a good position on Page 1 in the SERP. It is more of a SEO test project.

But if I don’t get more time to work on my sniper sites, I might just keep the posts about them to 1 per month. Instead I’ll clean up my blog (starting with a new WP Theme as you can see now), sort out the categories and blog more about Small Business Websites, stuff I do in my own business at the moment and ofcourse there might be some posts about living in Miraflores, Peru.

Project Google Sniper – Week #6

Sniper sites created: 14

Google rankings on main keyword
CB Sniper #1: None
CB Sniper #2: 6 (-4)
CB Sniper #3: 8 (-1)
CB Sniper #4: 26 (-10)
CB Sniper #5: 48 (-10)
CB Sniper #6: 8 (+2)
CB Sniper #7: 8 (-2)
CB Sniper #8: 6 (-3)
CB Sniper #9: 4 (-1)
CB Sniper #10: 5 (+0)
CB Sniper #11: 7 (-4)
CB Sniper #12: 4 (+0)
AdSense #13: 11 (+2)
AdSense #14: NONE

Clickbank hops: 160 (+28) (New analytics) / 187 (+45) (Own stats)
Amazon clicks: 90 Clicks (+23)
Amazon Earnings: $0.56

Now Making Adsense Sniper Sites

I tried doing some research and rethinking of my project this weekend, as I took a travel to La Paz and got a lot of time to relax, do some work and think about my strategy. With the low CTR on clickbank, I figured out that it is better to go for CPC (Google Adsense) instead of Affiliate Marketing with CPA. Currently I am testing a few of the sniper sites with putting Adsense on it, and setting them to be viewed around 400 times. This will give me an idea of the CTR in those niches, and see if its more profitable to turn them into Adsense Snipers. Besides that I made some new Keyword Research, and registred 9 new domains for Adsense Sniper sites. One of these sites will be an authority site, as I like the subject and would like to add some more articles on the site. I’ll try to create 5 articles per week for the site, and see how it will go.

Inspired by Mike Iser, who is truly a site-building machine with over 70 Adsense Sniper sites, I will try to create 1 new Adsense Sniper every day in this week, and see how that goes. Next week I’ll have to decide if I want to spend some time creating backlinks with Unique Article Wizard (UAW) and EzineArticles, and maybe try some other techniques, or if I want to keep on pumping out Adsense Sniper Sites. I also decided to write atleast 1 EzineArticle for each site, with a link to the main site and one of the posts. I hope this will give me a good positive effect on the rankings for the sites.

Project Google Sniper – Week #5

Sniper sites created: 14

Google rankings on main keyword
Site #1: None
Site #2: 2 (Back in rankings after 3-4 days in Sandbox)
Site #3: 7 (+0)
Site #4: 16 (+21)
Site #5: 40 (Doing some Google Dancing)
Site #6: 10 (-1)
Site #7: 6 (-3)
Site #8: 3 (+0)
Site #9: 4 (+1)
Site #10: 5 (+2)
Site #11: 3 (+0)
Site #12: 4 (+1)
Site #13: 13 (NEW)
site #14: NONE (NEW)

Clickbank hops: 132 (+62) (New analytics) / 142 (+58) (Own stats)
Amazon clicks: 67 Clicks (-12)
Amazon Earnings: $0

Note that I have not read “Xfactors guide” to these Adsense sniper sites, and my experience and description is solely based on my current experience with Google Sniper, and what I have read about these types of sites on other blogs. I mostly got inspired by Mike Iser, who is reporting daily about is road to a full time passive Internet income, and also Sara from Noteworthy Tips. Sara also blogs about her journey to a $5k a month income from Internet marketing, so those two blogs are definately worth checking out, if you a looking for more information about making money online.

So what is these “Adsense Sniper” sites?

In essence they are basically sites “Made for Adsense” (MFA), but this is a bit “hush-hush”, as it is against the rules of Google Adsense. You start by doing some keyword research, and find some good keywords with a lot of searches on, where the competition (other sites ranking in Google) is low and the Adwords CPC is as high as possible. Then you buy a domain name with the exact keyword in and create your Adsense sniper site by writing a few texts about the subject, ofcouse optimised for Google by using LSI keywords (I might write more about that subject later). Do a bit of link building (Like submitting UAW articles or EzineArticles) and get your site to rank in the first 10 results on Google for that keyword. Ofcouse the best would be to rank #1, and get as many visits from Google as possible.

The goal for your sites is then to get this traffic from Google converted into clicks on your Adsense boxes. Lets say you find a keyword called “Dog training tips”, get the domain “dogtrainingtips.com” and get a lot of traffic from your main keyword on Google. Your goal will not just be to give some good information about “Dog training tips”, but to get the visitors to click on the Adsense links, and in the end earning you money.

Now these sites may take 3-5 hours to create and get ranking, but if you get them to be stable in the search results, you will keep getting traffic (and money) from these sites, without having to work on them again. Using this method you can end up having a nice big passive income, earning money for years without doing more than 3-5 hours of work for each site. That is the basic idea behind the Adsense Sniper Sites.

I hope you could use this description of Adsense Snipers, make sure to follow my blog for more updates on this subject in the future. I am already working on creating my first batch of these new sniper sites, and I will ofcourse keep blogging about my experiences and how it will go.

12 of 12 done

The good news this week, is that I got the last 2 sites up and all 12 sniper sites are now indexed. As I dont got much time to work on my sniper sites this week, I will take a break creating new sites and finding new niches, and instead focus on making all the sites show up in the search results, get good rankings in Google and test what works and doesnt work.

The good thing is that the 6 new keywords I found (Site #7-12) seems to be doing really great in Google on the choosen term, without any form of work done with them. I only submitted them to the different bookmarking sites to get the indexed, and didnt do anything else. My next step over the next couple of weeks, is to submit at least 1 UAW article and 1-2 EzineArticles for each site. Some of them are already generating good traffic, but no sales yet, so I can only imagine that creating some more backlinks and testing with more content and affiliate link placement will help me to make my first CB sale.

Amazon Is In The Lead

I made another sale of $4.80 on Amazon this week, which makes Amazon the only thing I am actually selling right now. There can be different explanations for this, some of them is that the site is doing pretty well in Google, getting quite a bit of traffic – but the most likely is, that the site is pinpoint to buying customers in the right season. It is a micro-niche under Christmas, so I actually dont expect to sell anything the rest of the year. But each Christmas there is a huge market potential for this, so when the season is over this year, the domain and site can age for the next year, and hopefully make even more income next year.
Giving my success with Amazon, even though it is not a lot of money so far, I am really tempted to make a few other niche sites directly related to niche-categories on Amazon, and see if I can duplicate this process. I’d like to find a niche with much more expensive products as the percentage from Amazon is so low.

If you have any questions, feedback or good ideas, maybe something you would like me to test, please feel free to leave a comment here. I’d also like to hear about other peoples experience with Google Sniper sites and maybe also with Google AdSense Sniper sites, as I’d like to try some AdSense sniping soon.

Project Google Sniper – Week #4

Sniper sites created: 12
Sites indexed: 12
Backlinks to all sites: 765 (+463)

Google rankings on main keyword
Site #1: None
Site #2: None (Google Slapped / Sandboxed)
Site #3: 7 (+0)
Site #4: 37 (+2)
Site #5: 17 (Now ranking)
Site #6: 9 (-3)
Site #7: 3 (+11)
Site #8: 3 (+4)
Site #9: 5
Site #10: 7
Site #11: 3
Site #12: 5

Clickbank hops: 70 (-18) (New analytics) / 116 (-6) (Old analytics) / 84 (-73) (Own stats)
Amazon clicks: 79 Clicks
Amazon Earnings: $4.80 (1.27% Conversion Rate)