Oral SeymourEntrepreneur. Internet, Technology, Social Networking and Search Engine Enthusiast………

I decided to start a new section. Q and A. I will post some of the questions that I am asked by email or in forums from the previous week. Keeping with the theme of the blog, I will keep things simple and easy to understand, the more difficult stuff I will hand off to David Harry over at www.huomah.com

How do I increase my pagerank?

I put it at the top of the list but I’m not even going to bother and answer this one….The Toolbar Pagerank is worthless, please don’t waste your precious time worrying about it. Matt Cutts says it’s at least 3 months outdated. It is just a by product of a good SEO and a good linking campaign.

When is the next Pagerank update?

See the answer to question #1

Is the $299 annual fee for the Yahoo Directory worth it?

If your budget allows for it then I say go ahead….Not a lot of people know this but the Yahoo Directory accepts free submissions for non-commercial sites. The review process takes a few weeks and only a few are accepted but its worth a try. Apply here.

I am ranked top 15 to 20 in Google for my top keyword and I receive more traffic than a number 3 ranking in MSN.

I can’t give you a definitive answer for this one. I have seen this phenomenon on many occasions. It leaves me scratching my head wondering if anyone still uses MSN? Just kidding….people do. IAfter doing a quick and I reiterate very quick analysis from the internet stats that I have available to me, the keywords used in MSN searches show that most MSN searchers are relatively new to the internet. I’ve even heard rumors that most of the people that use MSN Search are computer newbies that just fire up the Internet Explorer browser and search MSN since it’s the default page. Or it could simply be the fact that MSN has only 11% of the US search market. If you have a better theory, please let me know.

I paid twice for the $19.95 submmission service to 1000 directories and search engines and two months later I still can’t find my site in Google.

LMAO….I’m sorry to be the one to tell you but you got ripped off. You don’t need to pay to get your site indexed in Google, All you need to do is get a couple of links pointing to your site. I’m also taking a wild guess here that most of the “directories and search engines” that your site was submitted to were spammy free for all link pages that the search engines hate. You only need to worry about Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Does file extension affect the search engine ranking in any way? Is server side programming language we use important to rank high in the search engine? Will pages with .php extensions rank as well as pages with .html extensions?

The file extension and server side technology has no effect whatsoever on search engine placement.

A Toolbar Poem
by the Gypsy

Oral my friend U try and U try
I sit and I wonder – o why? O why?
The Cult of PR is stronger than you
Just LGB watchers, what can you do?

Both U and I know about toolbars and such
We know - in reality - they just don’t mean much
So be happy in knowing, wherever U are
This ain’t PageRank Mate – It’s ToolBar PR

The title of the post caught your attention right? Sorry but this is not another adsense how to post.

To make money from adsense, or any other online advertising program, you need to get visitors first. If anywhere from 1% to 5% of visitors click on an ad, then you won’t make any real money until you start hitting the 1000 visitors a day threshhold.

To get that you need real and unique content. These made for adsence (MFA) sites, that are sold by Joel Comm and others that are so popular will never ever succeed in earning more than money to buy coffee and maybe some donuts if your lucky. Why?, you might ask…..because they don’t have any real and unique content, and so real people won’t come back to them. How can a template and content that is sold to 100,000 other people be unique to your site? And no….adding some simple RSS feeds to the bottom of your site does not constitute unique and fresh content when it’s also streamed to 1000s of other websites.

Do the web a favor and do not ask silly questions on how to SEO such sites on Digitalpoint or on the Adsense Google Group . You will only make money with good content. Make your site to offer some service or help to people.

According to data collected from users of European Web analytics provider OneStat, most people use 2- or 3-word queries in search engines. The RankStat research is based on a sample of 2 million visitors, made up of 20,000 visitors in 100 countries each day.

Here’s the full breakdown:

1. Two-word phrases — 28.38 percent
2. Three-word phrases — 27.15 percent
3. Four-word phrases — 16.42 percent
4. One-word phrase — 13.48 percent
5. Five-word phrases — 8.03 percent
6. Six-word phrases — 3.67 percent
7. Seven-word phrases — 1.63 percent
8. Eight-word phrases — 0.73 percent
9. Nine-word phrases — 0.34 percent
10. Ten-word phrases — 0.16 percent

We should bear this in mind when doing SEO, researching keywords etc. It also shows that the general population has become and more specific when searching.

I just noticied that Wikipedia is now adding the rel=nofollow link to external links. I think its about time. I can’t imagine the headache that the editors go through and the endless spam that they have to deal with.

I saw this day coming a long time ago, because of the authority status that Wikipedia has and the fact that it is in the top 5 for many Google searches, every SEO knows a incoming link from a Wikipedia article is like gold and many even go as far as to add their site’s links to as many articles in as many categories as they possibly can.

Its seems like the transformation is not complete as some articles are using the tag and some aren’t.

How did I find out? I visited the site today and I use the SEO for Firefox plugin which shows links that have the rel=nofollow tag in bright red.

Robert Deniro’s Wikipedia article with rel=nofollow on external links
SEO for Firefox Plugin review

+ + = $$$

It just came to my realization that Google’s Adsense recently changed their program policy. You can now put Adsense on the same page along with any other contextual advertising system. You must however, differentiate Adsense from the other advertising system, such as using a different color and background. I can now test using Adsense and other contextual advertising programs on the same page, compare stats side by side and in a few months, I’ll be able to see which has the consistently higher cost per click (CPC).

The excerpt from Google’s guidelines is below. read it on Google’s adsense help site

You’re welcome to display Google ads on the same site or page as other third party advertisements provided that the formatting or colors of the third party ads is different enough from that of the Google ads. In other words, if you choose to place non-Google ads on the same site or page as Google ads, it should always be clear to the user that the ads are served by different advertising networks and that the non-Google ads have no association with Google. If the formats are naturally similar, we ask that you choose different color schemes for the competing ads.

Our intent with this policy is to be as fair to our advertisers as possible and to maintain the integrity of the AdWords and AdSense programs. You can learn more about this, and all our policies, on our program policies page.

I guess this was done with relatively low fanfare because I haven’t seen it much. Just on one thread in Digitalpoint.

UPDATE: Adsense can be used with other contextual advertising programs provided that the other advertiser also allows this. I checked YPN’s TOS and as of this time it seems they do not allow it. Its better to send an email and ask YPN before you implement them both on the same page. An excerpt from YPN rules and conditions below

Exclusivity. For any webpage or RSS feed that includes the Ad Code, you agree not to display or link to any other advertising (including but not limited to any listing) that is mapped to or responds to the content of the Ad Page.