Tag Archives: Web page

Google Adsense rewards quick server page loads

Maybe the reason why you can’t even quite get into the top-five or number-one spot on Google search is because you’re not spending enough time or money getting the best Web host and Web server you can afford and then optimizing how your serve your Web pages, especially when your modern CMS is backed by a database.

I have a theory that both where you end up on search results as well as how much money you can make advertising AdWords ads via AdSense depends not merely on SEO or surfing the right trends or even finding the long tail sweet spot, but also on how quick, responsive, reliable, and durable the server that hosts your blog or site is. The faster the page loads, the better your site will rank on Google search, all other things being equal. Take it to the bank.

When my server was really under-powered and unoptimized, I was averaging $4/day, then after moving stuff around and optimized, it went up to a more reliable $11-25/day. Then, the site started getting more popular from better ranking and then the reliability decreased and the daily take returned to $4-6/day or so.

Now, with more physical RAM in the box and some cloud-based back-up to handle big popularity spikes, I am seeing quite a few $15-$25/day pay-outs.That’s only one person’s experience, but that’s all I got.

What I am going to tell you is not hard science. I might even be recognizing the wrong patterns. And, my sample size is one subject over a long period of time, my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, which is a very big, old, blog with 6,894 posts, 4,631 comments, 4,244 categories, and 14,092 tags — all back-ended by a MySQL database and fortified with WP Super Cache on a dedicated server.

My blog gets about 50,000 visits-a-month and once-in-a-while I will get a spike to 20,000 visits in a day — for example, when I surfed the Royal Wedding coverage. I serve AdWord ads on the site and I have been noticing that all things being equal, whenever my system administrator adds RAM memory, is able to optimize the database, increase uptime, and add either bandwidth or resources to the box that in some way makes the site quicker to serve, especially when slashdotted or digg-dotted from popularity, then Google rewards me with more advertising revenue.

And this happens not only during the days when I am being crashed by being mentioned on Mashable or retweeted by Guy Kawasaki, adding hardware and software resources to my dedicated server that adds to the box’s durability, reliability, and especially quickness and responsiveness is what does it on a daily basis.

And, I understand why Google does this. Isn’t this obvious? They are looking to provide their visitor, their users, their searchers, with a seamless and splendid experience. So, amazing user interface and quality of research and content cannot be enjoyed from a site that has repeatedly shown that it is habitually slow or unresponsive.

I honestly believe that the time a page loads is an important variable in the algorithm that Google deploys when it is indexing and ranking resource sites. You might have your user interface, site architecture and content completely sorted out; you might have organic link-tos and a PR of 5 or above; but at the end of the say, Google won’t send its searchers to a site that won’t load fast.

Cheap, slow hosting is fine when you’re new, but when you get as big as the Chris Abraham blog, with almost seven-thousand active posts and an open-season on comments, you really need to make sure your hardware can match your traffic, your popularity, your spikes, and your database requirements–and exceed them–or Google might give you ranking demerits and you might lose the trust and faith that Google had in you, resulting in their needing to either rank you down a few or off the front page so as to prevent a negative user experience.

Don’t forget that this is especially important for someone who is using Google on a smart phone. These folks are searching for timely information, especially when they’re on the road having a mobile web experience. After suffering through EDGE or 3G bandwidth issues just to reach Google, getting a “database cannot connect” from your site or blog doesn’t make you look good nor does it make the search engine that referred you.

What do you think? What are your experiences? Via Biznology

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How to make awesome Social Media News Releases

Last week I dissected a blogger outreach pitch email line-by-line in A detailed analysis of a perfect blogger pitchas a way of proving that no matter how brief and conversational one of Abraham Harrison‘s blogger pitches may appear at first blush, the effortlessness takes a lot of work and the time of three senior agents. Today I plan to go through, line by line, a site we create to support all of our blogger outreach campaigns. You can call it a Social Media News Release (SMNR) or a microsite, a resource site, or a fact sheet. To those of you who are in communications, you’ll recognize the structural similarity between it and a traditional news release or press release.

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Inside a Social Media News Release

Image via CrunchBase

Last week I dissected a blogger outreach pitch email line-by-line in The art of writing the perfect blogger pitch as a way of proving that no matter how brief and conversational one of Abraham Harrison‘s blogger pitches may appear at first blush, the effortlessness takes a lot of work and the time of three senior agents. Today, I plan to go through, “line-by-line,” a site we create to support all of our blogger outreach campaigns, that we call a Social Media News Release (SMNR) but we also call a Microsite, a Resource Site, or a Fact Sheet. To those of you who are in Communications, you’ll recognize the structural similarity between it and a traditional News Release/Press Release.

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Set up your Google+ Brand Page right now!

Last week, I wrote Max SEO with 8 simple Google+ steps before Google opened up G+ Brand Pages, so first go read what I wrote in the previous post (because all of the advice still applies).

In this post, we’ll work on setting up your brand page right away in the right way. If you follow these steps, you’ll be as well-placed as possible.

First, did you notice that there’s a new button on your Google+ profile? Go ahead and click “Create a Google+ page” and we’ll get started…

Your first option is to create a page. Be careful here, because it isn’t simple to change the sort of page you have.

Unless your brand is obviously represented in the list below, please click on each one, check out the categories, see what information it asks you for, and scroll down on the categories and sub-categories that the particular Page Category offers:

I chose “Arts, Entertainment, or Sports” because it offered “blog” as a choice. Since I am creating a G+ Brand Page for my blog, Because the Medium is the Message at chrisabraham.com, it was obvious to me, but I did poke around a lot just to be sure. Then you’ll have a few things to fill out, including your tagline, a branded photo (I didn’t have one so I just used a funny photo of my big nose with a nude Breathe Right Nasal Strip.

The next step, after uploading my photo, as seen above, is an opportunity to crop the photo — so feel free to upload any photo you want as you’ll be easily able to crop however you like — just like on Facebook.

When you click “Continue” after cropping and all that, you’ll get the below dialogue, asking you to send out a post onto your own personal Google+ profile wall.

So, follow my advice in Max SEO on G+ in 8 steps and make sure you make the announcement publicly and consider including emailing as well.

Now the tricky part: In order to post as a brand page you need to become the brand page. When you are the brand page, you post as the brand page. It might get confusing–it is for me. It is a little like the new Facebook Pages where you can re-identify you as your brand. So, how do you swap? It isn’t 100% obvious, especially if you’re used to how it is done on Facebook. See below:

The menu is subtle, grayed out, and right next to your profile picture. The profile picture is also a clue as to who you currently are: Chris+ or Abraham Harrison+ or Because the Medium is the Message+… see the pull down below. The good thing is that there are some visual clues and the profile icon does changes when you’re a different brand and a different person:

Then you’re “done”–which isn’t to say we’re done. Why not try posting your first post–and I will show you why you have some work ahead of you:

See? You have no friends! You can only, by default, post it like you do on your first day tweeting or blogging–nobody’s there except only the hungry eyes of the Google Real-Time Web and Google Real-Time Search.

OK, so how are you going to sex all of this up? Well, continue emailing your friends, blogging, and posting on your Facebook and announcing your new Google+ brand page on your Facebook Page or Pages, and tweet the heck out of it on Twitter. If you look below, you can check to see how many people add you to their circles and follow your new brand page over time:

OK, now while you’re doing a loud Olly Olly Oxen Free to collect your new followers, you need to take the next step, which Google doesn’t make so obvious: you have lots of opportunity to add some more information about you and the page. It’s hidden under “About” and “Edit Profile” as you can see below:

If you click on the text after “Introduction” and “Contact Info” an editable box will pop up and you can write up an introductory about me/about us with a bonus: the introduction accepts rich text and HTML and links and whatnot–so there is a lot you can do with this About: Introduction information. I pasted a very long tract of text over on the Abraham Harrison+ page and there were no limits to links, etc. Maybe you can even paste in graphics and photos–I have not tested it yet.

Then you can really go to town with the contact info: you can keep on adding and adding and adding–I added just about the kitchen sink, as you’ll see below:

Et voilà!

That should be good for now. And, if you need to figure out what to do now, why don’t you follow my 8 simple Google+ steps to max SEO.

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Google search algorithm rewards the quickest page loads

I honestly believe that the time a page loads is an important variable in the algorithm that Google deploys when it is indexing and ranking resource sites. You make have your user interface and site architecture and content completely sorted out, you might have organic link-tos and a PR of 5 or above, but at the end of the say, Google won’t send its searchers to a site that won’t load fast.

What do you think? What are your experiences?
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Google search rewards the quickest page loads

What do you think? What are your experiences?
Continue reading →

Avoiding the Facebook Monster

Wednesday marked the third somewhat annual meeting of Facebook developers in California called the F8 (pronounced “fate”) conference. Amid rumors of Internet domination and privacy obliteration, Mark Zuckerberg calmly announced , among other, slightly less press-worthy items, that Facebook would be launching the universal “like” button (a.k.a the Facebook Monster) so that users could thumbs up individual web pages and publish that to Facebook for their friends to see. The button/monster is designed to embed Facebook functionality outside of Facebook and allow web page publishers to tailor content to a user based on his/her like history. Users will also be able to tell which of their friends have liked the same web page or news story or whatever.

Now I can understand why people are getting all up in arms about privacy. Facebook has the potential to collect the motherload of data about user preferences, interests an buying habits and channel this information to advertisers or the CIA. However, during the F8 conference, Facebook did not make any official ad announcement, only that they didn’t have plans to change their current policy which allows developers to apply user data to target ads on their own site.

Phillip Rhoades wrote a great post earlier this week explaining why he thought these changes were “just some new toys, not the death of privacy,” and I agree. People are worried about Facebook becoming Big Brother and when the media uses phrases like “Facebook extended its tentacles across the internet today” and “its claws for pulling in outside content are now razor-sharp,” the privacy nervousness gets a little more acute. But users should remember that if they agree to make something public by clicking a like button – it’s public. And as Christina Warren says over at Mashable, “public no longer means ‘public on Facebook,’ public means ‘public in the Facebook ecosystem.’”

Just learn how to properly use Facebook’s privacy settings and educate yourself about how the personalized feeds work, and you’ll avoid the slimy tentacles and razor-sharp claws of the Facebook monster. And maybe, just maybe you’ll start to like the personalized playlist Pandora has put together for you based on what bands you have liked elsewhere on the web. I think that might be pretty cool.