Yahoo Partners With Zillow For Real Estate Listings

Posted on July 9, 2010 by Dollars

Yahoo made news not too long ago when certain investors demanded that the company be sold (to Microsoft) and then again when Yahoo partnered with Microsoft’s search engine technology in order to get out of the business of being a search engine. While such news was apparently welcome to investors who had grown tired of owning the stock of a company that was the number two search engine in the world. Apparently, the company’s new CEO agreed and Yahoo search has been wound down. Most Yahoo search results are now powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine, whether that is made apparent on any particular webpage or not.

The question, of course, has to be then, what Yahoo plans to do as a business in order to make money if it will not be a search engine company. The answer has been a scattered set of developments, online services, and technologies that Yahoo! has rolled out over the last year or two, including Yahoo buying Associated Content.

Ironically, in many of the new areas Yahoo is focusing on are ones where the company is also the #2 provider (or less). One of the areas that Yahoo has been working at expanding its online offerings for is real estate listings.

Searching Real Estate Listings Online

Some industries were ripe for the Internet from the moment the technology and bandwidth speeds were in place to handle them. Searching homes for sale was one of those areas. The Internet allows users to browse through hundreds of real estate listings, including pictures without having to drive around just to see a dozen houses. What’s more, computers are great at parameter based searching. Users can select to only see houses with more than three bedrooms, or only those with at least a two-car garage, and so on.

Yahoo! Real Estate has been providing just such an online home search service to users for some time. However, it has languished behind other websites with a real estate focus. The company has made a new move to increase its real estate listing offerings, as well as provide more advertising sales and opportunities to local real estate agents via a new partnership with Zillow.

One of the things that make this deal interesting for those looking to earn money by writing websites or making money writing online by using AdSense or other online advertising is that Zillow has shown up as one of the Google third-party ad networks for Google AdSense. With Zillow offering ads on both the Google publisher network and on Yahoo, savvy webmasters and professional writers creating online content will need to keep an eye on whether or not their Google approved AdSense sites continue to get “the good ads” or whether the CPC for third-party ad network ads drops due to Zillow serving up lesser or left over ads on Google content publisher websites.

(Note: The deal was just announced and no one knows what, if any affect, it will have on AdSense earnings or publisher websites. This is only one more reason to closely monitor the level of AdSense success each website has, not a statement that things are already worse, or that things will change at all.)

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Best WordPress Plug-in For Website Developers and Online Writers

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Dollars

Every day it seems like my RSS feed reader has at least a handful of posts about the greatest WordPress plugins of all time, or the best SEO plug-ins for WordPress, or — my personal favorite — top WordPress plug-ins you can’t live without. (And my not so favorite, WordPress plugins you “literally” can’t live without; someone needs to look up the word ‘literally’ before they ever use it again.) I have never bothered to write a post about the best WordPress plugins because I have used different plugins on different websites depending upon what the purpose of the website was and how I intended to use it. I have written about the best WordPress themes for writers because there seems to be a knowledge gap there. However, I have now found a plugin that everyone should use on every WordPress blog site that they have no matter what the website is for.

The One WordPress Plug-in Everyone Needs on Every Site

No matter had good of professional writer you are, and no matter what you write about, you will eventually end up with a broken link on your site.

broken-links-wordpress-plugin-1A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a webpage that no longer exists (or never existed). No matter how careful someone is, this will eventually happen to every user on every site, because webpages move or are deleted for all kinds of different reasons. the most common reason a webpage is moved is when it is archived, or when the link points to a news or current events kind of page that may be moved or eliminated when it is no longer considered current.

Of course, there are a lot of other reasons that a weblink can disappear. For example, Technorati links created over a year or two ago pointed to technorati.com/tags/keyword. Now, all Technorati tags have URIs using the word ‘tag’ instead of ‘tags’. Most of those will be redirected if clicked. If those redirects are setup as 301 Redirects for SEO purposes then some of their link power will still flow to the final destination.

However, links that are either not redirected at all, or that are redirected in another manner will result in a Page Not Found error for users and waste the so-called link juice of page authority because Google will still count it as an outbound link even if it doesn’t go anywhere. Even if you are not using the ranking link power of that page for your own purposes, it is still valuable to ensure that the links you do have benefit fully from your link juice.

The trouble is that it is way too labor intensive to check each and every link on anything but the smallest websites. Even if you hired some work at home temp to check them all it would still take forever, and worse of all, it would all have to be done again. Just because a link exists today, doesn’t mean it will still be there tomorrow.

WordPress Broken Links Plug-In

The WordPress plug-in Broken Links automatically checks every link on your entire WordPress blog website. All broken links that are found are displayed on a single screen.

– Take a break and read the Southwest Airlines rewards card review.

If this was all the Broken Links WordPress plugin did, I wouldn’t be writing about it. What makes Broken Links the best WordPress plugin ever for writers and webmasters is that the broken links that are found can be edited right from the report the plugin generates. In other words, there is no need to open every post that has a dead link, find the link, see where it goes, and then edit or delete the link. Instead, the Broken Links plug-in lets you unlink the broken URL with a single click. No need to ever leave the screen. If you want to fix the link rather than get rid of it, just click Edit URL instead and the link becomes editable right there. Again, you don’t even have to open the original post to fix every broken link on your site.

THAT would be enough to make me write about this top WordPress plug-in everyone needs. But, that is not the end. WordPress 3.0 plug-in Broken Links also shows all the links on your site that are being redirected. As we’ve noted before, redirecting incoming URLs with 301 Permanently Moved redirects helps preserve the link juice flowing to those pages as a way of keeping their Page Rank and authority, but not 100% of the link power flows through a 301 redirect. To get that, you have to modify the link itself. Unfortunately, doing that is just as big of undertaking as fixing all the broken links on your website.

However, the Broken Links WordPress 3.0 plug-in detects redirected links and allows you to edit them on the same screen just like it does for links that are broken. That means you can fix 100 links with the wrong address in the URL in just a few minutes. For example, I moved the Best Hubris strategy, management, and marketing blog from www.besthuris.com to besthubris.com a little while back. While I have 301 redirects in place to remove the www from all incoming URLs, there is no substitute for getting all the links to actually point at BestHubris without the www in them. So, I’ve been going through and and clicking Edit URL and removing the www in small batches as a way to take break between freelance writing projects.

I’ve loaded Broken Links on all of my websites now and expect to do the same to each of them, where needed, in the coming weeks and months.

Turbo Boost SEO Power with WordPress 3.0 Plug-in Broken Links

Unlinking broken links to give the links that are left more link juice power, plus retaining the full link power juice of any pages that have been moved and redirected may actually provide more SEO benefit than all of the WordPress SEO plugins out there do by tweaking title tags, header tags, and meta-data. I’ll be keeping an eye on my analytics reports and on Google Webmaster Tools to see just what kind of benefit using the Broken Links plugin for WordPress 3.0 gives my websites.

What do you do, if anything, to check for broken links on your websites? Do you check for redirected links? How much link juice linking power do you think your are wasting if you don’t fix old out of date links?

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Best WordPress For Writers Just Got Better

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Dollars

WordPress blogging platform is one of the best ways for writers to build websites to showcase their writing talent. It is also a great way to build an online writing portfolio and is a very useful platform for earning money writing online. Now that WordPress 3.0 has been released, the question is when to install the new version.If you are used to software updates on your personal computer, you might be tempted to run out and install the latest version of blogging software right away in order to get all the new features and bug fixes. When it comes to using WordPress to make money writing online, that is not always the best strategy.

In order to make money writing online, you need more than just the default base installation of WordPress. There are important plugins for WordPress to search optimize your posts, to automatically configure Google Analytics, and caching plugins for WordPress. Of course, don’t forget about the customizations from WordPress themes. If you are a professional writer building a money making website online, or just using a website to showcase your own writing or writing business, you need a high-quality theme.

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The best WordPress themes for writers are not always fancy, but they do make full use of all the available WordPress functionality. That means that upgrading your WordPress installation is about more than just updating WordPress. You also have to update your WordPress plug-ins, your WordPress themes, and any custom code that you implemented yourself in order to maximize the earning potential or traffic building power of your online web presence. Unless you wrote the HTML, CSS, and source code for the WordPress add-ons you have installed, you have to wait for the developers of them to update their themes and plugins. Since most of these are free, chances are that they are not the only things going on in that developer’s life which means you might have to wait a few days, or even a week or two for your favorite WordPress plugins and writing themes to be fully upgraded to support the latest version of WordPress.

Over the next few days, you will notice that most or all of your plugins will be updated. You can see this by looking at the number in the circle near the word Plugins on the current WordPress dashboard screen. Once most of your plugins have been updated (and once ALL of your critical function plugins have been updated), then and only then, can you look at upgrading your blog to WordPress 3.0.

Until then, just sit tight. WordPress 3.0 is all about better functionality, more blogging features, and better performance and faster speed. There is no need to update immediately for security reasons. That means that being patient is also be safe. Better that, than to take down your passive income generation machine.

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Secret Formula For Google AdSense Money Making Websites

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Dollars

money There is a lot of information out there about how to make money with Google AdSense. Most of it boils down to some version of:

  1. Research Keywords
  2. Write Keyword Optimized Posts or Pages
  3. Build Backlinks to Optimized Articles
  4. Move Up in Search Engine Rankings
  5. Profit

If this sounds about right to you, I have some bad news for you. There is a very good chance that even if you fully succeed at the money making method listed above, you may never earn more money from AdSense than a few pennies.

If earning money from Google AdSense ads can’t be done by following the methodology above, then why do so many people repeat it?

First, off, congratulations on asking the right question. Secondly, the answer to that question is actually in the question itself. So many people repeat what they have “learned” about search engine optimization, or SEO, and making money with AdSense that it has become accepted conventional wisdom, even if it is not entirely true. If you are serious about making money writing online, it is imperative to be able to distinguish knowledge that has been used and verified first-hand, and the so-called knowledge that has been copied from sources second-hand.

The good news is that the formula for making money with Google AdSense above is not false, so much as it is incomplete. The most important step for earning money with AdSense has been left out of the formula, unintentionally, by hundreds of writers and webmasters trying to make a name for themselves as money making bloggers by reading information and then passing it on. There is nothing wrong with doing this. I do it everyday as a professional freelance writer by creating content and articles for publication based upon research that has been given to me, or data that I have researched myself. The catch is, that in order to be useful, the research that writing is based on must be both accurate, and complete. (You can read my freelance writing blog for more information and freelance writing tips.)

What Is Missing From Google AdSense Formula for Earning Money?

The key to making money with AdSense is getting clicks on the ads that are placed on the website or the advertisements displayed on the webpage that you have build with perfect keyword optimization. Most AdSense manuals of instruction provide the insider information for making money using Google AdSense by saying that you can expect a one percent (1%) click through rate on the Google ads displayed on your high-ranking webpage. However, while that number may be inline with most reported click-through-rates or CTR studies, that number is an average CTR rate, not a standard CTR rate.

The reality of Google AdSense is that some keywords get much higher click through rates. The bad news, is that many keywords get much lower click through rates.

If you spend a lot of time optimizing high-quality content and then linking it to the #1 position in Google search results (sometimes called Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs), but nobody clicks on the ads that get displayed, you won’t make any money with AdSense no matter how good you are at high-ranking, keyword optimized, content for the web.

How do you find out what searches have keywords that get clicked a lot? Unfortunately, the only true answer is trial and error.

Some webpages can literally get a 25 percent CTR or even higher because the people searching for that information are so likely to be in need of services or products provided by Google’s advertisers. Other webpages can get less than 0.01% CTR because the people looking for that particular information have no need for the products or services provided.

The best way to find high-paying keywords for profitable AdSense targeting is to research high-volume, good-paying keywords and then publish well-written, high-quality web content around those keywords. Then, build some links to those articles and webpages in order to increase web traffic by having high-ranking search results linking to your content. By checking your AdSense Reports and your Google Analytics reports, you can determine which webpages are resulting in high click through rates and cross-reference those pages with what keywords are driving traffic to those webpages. Using those keywords to create high-ranking, top-quality, keyword optimized content to drive profitable traffic to your website that will actually click on your Google AdSense placements is the key to making money writing online by using AdSense.

Next Steps Making Money With AdSense

When you are ready to get serious about earning money with AdSense, important steps cannot be skipped.

First, you will need to start a writing business so that you don’t have to give your social security number out to everyone in order to get paid. Second, you will need to get approved for Google AdSense accounts. Third, it can help to be approved for Google AdWords as well. Finally, you will need to build a profitable website. One of the easiest ways to create a quality website is by using WordPress. Don’t get bogged down in WordPress themes that are search engine optimized and flashy. They are not any better for making money with AdSense and can cost you more dollars for webhosting if they use too many resources. Instead, look for great WordPress themes for writers that can feature your content without appearing boring or amateurish.

Then, grab the Make Money Writing Online Feed to stay up to date on all of the best money making writing techniques.

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