breednet

Google Adsense is the current leader in content-sensitive web-based marketing. However, Google is not unlike a “black hole” when it comes to how they determine who can join their program, how their program really works (i.e. pays you for hosting their ads) or why you may get your account suspended. Searching around the Internet, a lot of bloggers and webmasters are beginning to rebel against the Google “Wizard of Oz” strategy and look for alternatives. There are tons of stories of people who just cross a certain dollar amount (usually, $10 or $20 USD) and get their accounts suspended. Unfortunately, I see Google making many of the same philosophical mistakes of Microsoft 15-20 years ago. History repeats itself.

I recently had my Google Adsense account suspended (which is why this site went ad-free for the last 7-8 days), and received the following email:

Hello,

The Google AdSense Team

So, in a nutshell, too many visitors clicked on my ads and Google Adsense didn’t want to write a check. BTW, my Adsense account was active for about 30 days and was at about $11.60 or so. I have searched and read up on Google Adsense shutting down accounts as they cross the $10 barrier, as to not pay small site blogs, etc. (like this one). All of this being said, I went on a quest to find an alternative to Google Adsense.

What I found first was a great site at http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/adsense_top10/ that lays out the top 10 alternatives to Google Adsense. There is also a link to top alternatives to Google Adwords too. I ended up researching Adbrite, Clicksor and Bitvertiser and settled on Adbrite.

Adbrite is incredibly easy to use (just as easy as Adsense, maybe easier) and I like the fact that advertisers get to bid on your adspace. When I copied up the 3 ad zone code snippets, it took less than 24 hours for an advertiser to begin advertising on my site. I also like the inline text-based rollover search and plan to integrate that soon as well.

Since putting this web site up about a month ago, I have learned a lot about SEO and what it takes to get a site from zero to running. I wanted to go ahead and share some tips and key steps I learned in the process:

It is helpful to have a solid idea of what topics, ideas or general message you want to communicate on your web site. I have chosen to launch breednet.net as a dumping ground for a whole laundry list of tips, tricks, scripts, and other stuff that I have found useful at some point.

Once you get the concept, find a Content Management System (CMS) to help you. There are literally hundreds to choose from, and some of the more popular include Drupal, Wordpress and PHP-Nuke. These three are all well supported, are free/open-source, and have good documentation. I have built sites in all three over the last 10 years, and been able to get each up and running very quickly. If you would like to just pay someone to get your CMS up and running, click here to email me, and I would be glad to discuss your specific needs further.

Your site needs to also have some sort of structure. Usually your CMS will help you here. What is important is to have categories, sub-categories, keywords, and searching on your site.

Start creating content. That’s right, time to get some new content posted. I would work on getting 5-6 quality posts together, each one being at least 200 words. If you are using Wordpress, the admin section for Add New Post gives a nice Word count.

Be sure to use descriptive titles, with keywords included. If you are using Wordpress, there is a SEO All-in-one pack put out by Semper Fi Web Design that you will want to install that has options it will add to optimize for search engines, keyword inclusion and other features. You will want to do this for your 5-6 new pieces of flair/content.

If you are using Drupal or Wordpress, be sure to have Clean URLs enabled, PATH configured correctly in your httpd.conf file. This will prevent URL’s from being in a goofy format like http://www.mysite.com/?=p38, and instead http://www.mysite.com/20091012/Here-is-my-article/. Google for how to do this for your specific CMS.

Place some internal cross-links in your site, which in simple terms, link to yourself. This goes further than simply putting links to your home page, you might want to have content piece #4 link to content piece #2. For example, here is a link to a previous article I wrote on compiling and encrypting shell scripts.

Also, you might want to find sites with similar content or topic areas and offer to exchange links. For example, I have exchanged links with Cassandra Security, where I blog (and need to blog more).

Submit your site to Google. This is done online at http://www.google.com/addurl/. When I submitted my site, Google indexed it in about 3-4 days. YMMV.

You can also upload a sitemap to Google at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

I would also recommend adding some ads to your site, both to help get a little revenue, but more to gain experience for SEO and how online advertising works. I use Google Adsense and you can sign up at http://www.google.com/adsense. If you use Wordpress, there is an add-in called Easy Adsenser, which makes adding ads simple.

I would also recommend signing up for Google Analytics, so you can figure out where traffic is coming from, what content is successful and what is not. Go sign up at http://www.google.com/analytics/

Finally, once you have a method to get users to your site, track their activity, generate some ad revenue, I would recommend submitting to some social networking sites like Digg, del.icio.us and Furl to drive more page views.