Around the web and Back May 03 2008

From the author of the SEO bible, SEO Book, Aaron Wall, a complete online seo training course.

Some interesting posts are around the web for this week. Also there have been some events like the Tazzu WordPress Camp in Vancouver (I looked to see if someone spoke about wordpress seo in the event but could not find nothing really interesting or specific).

We can start out the John Chow’s presentation at WordPress Camp where speaks about ways of monetizing your blog and mentioned some useful plugins to monetize your site from such as the OIOPublisher plugin (which makes things much easier if you are selling private ads) and AdSense Deluxe. Even tho adsense deluxe is a lovely plugin which I tested the first time I started using adsense on this blog, I still prefer using WPAds (which I am using currently). John on the presentation also mentioned that it is wrong to add adsense in your sidebar, if I’d have to listen what everyone says then I would have not placed the 250×250 adsense block on my sidebar, which turns out to be the best performing block for this blog.

While if you are already monetizing your site through private ad sales then yeah, I’d guess John is right about using the adsense block in the sidebar is not good, since you will put your private advertisers with the adsense ads in competition. However, it is worth watching John’s presentation video as you might learn something new.

Image Thieves, Make Them Link Back To You

While readin Dazzlin Donna’s SEO Scop I came to know about this lovely javascript. Hotlinkers can steal bandwidth from you, they simply hotlink to the image that is hosted in your website and you pay for the bandwidth. Imagine if someone that has a very trafficked myspace profile site and is hotlinking to your image, your bandwidth would be growing in no matter of time (yeah same happened ot Dazzlin Dona). Well the solutions are two

• If you are using cPanel you can activate hotlink and allow only your site or your friends sites to leech the images from you, all the others would be blocked
• You can profit out of these leechers and get a linkback to your site

If you are short in bandwidth then solution one would work the best. But if bandwidth is not a question for you I would recommend you use this javascript code to gain backlinks out of the image leechers.

What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?

Aaron Wall comes again with one of those posts you should be always bookmarking and reading and re-reading. More then a post this looks like a real training program where Aaron explains how you can figure out how much is a top ranking in Google worth for your business. By using several metrics you can measure and have a close (if not a precise) idea how much traffic you can expect if you improve your rankings for few positions and what value actually has that ranking position.

The page is pretty long, but it is definitively worth reading as it is full of informations.

Meta Description Affects Ranking

Since always I have stated that meta description will in fact influence search engine rankings. This is what SEO Diva has stated in her post about meta description and rankings. Well even if the meta description might influence the search engine rankings it is minimal, I have made several tests, some for less competitive keywords and some on more competitive keywords, the improvement was much more visible in the less competitive keywords rather then the more competitive ones.

But what I also notice is that the click through rate increased in the more competitive keywords even tho rankings didn’t improved. It is a fact that a well descriptive meta description (which is visible under the title of the site in the SERPs listing) will influence the click through rate as it intrigues more visitors to know more about what that article has to share with them.

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