If you are a web host using PPC marketing to advertise your business, make sure you use negative keywords as well. You might want to add keywords like “VMWare” to your list of negative keywords to avoid your ad being displayed on searches not relevant to your offers.

Sometimes it is funny what kind of keywords websites are ranking for. I am spending a lot of time on my Web Hosting tutorial website lately trying to improve the site content and to provide a better user experience. A few weeks ago I had hired a designer to give the site a well needed facelift and now I am working on some SEO stuff as well. This evening I spent time reviewing my website statistics to see what keywords I am ranking for and why. The reason for this task is that I am ranking for keywords that are not necessarily the ones I want to be ranking for. Take a look at the following screenshot:

As an example I am ranking as #5 for the search term “sex tutorials”. When looking at the SERPS I see a specific web page returned where I wrote about how sex sells web hosting. Google picked that topic combined with title tag (contains the word “tutorials”) and decided to rank me well for “sex tutorials”. I doubt this is a great experience for a customer arriving at my website looking for hot pictures and juicy details on how to make love. I think it rather turns you off reading about web hosting strategies instead. If the search term would be used more on the Internet I would probably sign up for a sex related affiliate program and ‘guide’ the user into the right direction, but according to Yahoo/Overture the term “sex tutorials” is not searched for that often (even though Google provides over 2.5 Million results). Anyway – I will thoroughly analyze my log files and statistics for other terms and then eventually display matching product links to provide a better user experience.

We always wonder which pages of our websites carry more linking power. In most cases the homepage of a website carries the most power, but you can only put x number of links onto the homepage to use its linking power or link juice. Sub pages become more important if you want to distribute the link juice internally and create a good flow of link power among your web pages. Or for that matter if you link out to others those specific links would get more link juice (assuming that Google use similar indicators for link juice).

Anyway – here is a good way to identify pages on your blog that eventually carry more link power than others. Look up a specific blog at technorati and then check the authority value for the different sub pages. Technorati assigns an authority value to pages that are linked to from other blogs and other websites. I recently wrote a review of another website, a blog to be more specific. The other blog owner was courteous enough to link back to my blog posting. I waited 2 days to make sure Technorati had picked up the links. Look at the following screenshot:

It shows my technorati ranking for the blog post I am talking about. The other blog author has linked back to the particular blog posting and the technorati authority value his blog carries has transformed in an 107 authority value of my specific blog page. A normal authority value of blog postings on my affiliate marketing blog seems to be 49. So, by comparing those numbers you can see that the pages carry different values. I can now use the different values to identify web pages on my blog that carry higher authority value and then use that knowledge to eventually modify these pages to add internal links to other pages to distribute the linking power or link juice more equally across my entire blog.

Please note the following: You could use the same knowledge and find blogs that sell links through Text-Link-Ads and buy links inside blog postings that carry a higher authority value. Of course you could run risk that Google identifies those links and devalues them, but on the other side you might advertise on pages that receive incoming search engine traffic in general. And I will always assume you buy links only for traffic and not link juice. In general it is very important for good search engine rankings to distribute link power inside a website structure as it can push your site rankings up for terms you were not ranking for well before.

Last month was the very first month where I missed the $100 pay-out cutoff for Yahoo’s Publisher Network (YPN). I decided to wait a little longer to see if they can improve, but I think I am done with it. I am struggling to fill the $100.00 limit. This has become a major joke. My traffic has not changed, but YPN performance is still in the toilet. The ad targeting just simply sucks. One website is a local website for a city/town in Colorado. However, I am seeing local ads for Dallas and Houston. Yes, Dallas, Texas and Houston, Texas. That’s where the web server is located, (YPN) dummies. Or the ads are not showing up at all for 20-30+ seconds after a page has been completed loading. There is just empty space. And when ads come up they are those generic mortgage ads or whatever ads that Yahoo displays when they are not able to match text and ads. However (again) – this used to work in the past on my particular websites. This is just not acceptable anymore and I am trying to get off the YPN ads. But who would have guessed that it is almost impossible to make $14.00 in now 7 days of October?! I made $8.00 with YPN in October so far. I am used to make that much money on a single day with a single website using YPN and now 3 websites combined fail to make any money at all. If I make it to $100.00 anytime soon I am done with YPN for the near future. All my websites will be switched to Google Adsense.

Yahoo – you just don’t get it. Look at Google. Where is Google making its cash? Google Adwords! Google Adsense is one outlet for those ads. If Adsense would disappear today, where do you think would Google’s income be headin’? Down. Significantly down. Now look at your own version of Adwords and Adsense. Can you tell the difference? Apparently not!!!!!! It’s not that hard. Fix your problems and eventually your stock will start moving up again. Hire some dedicated developers and tie their salaries to the success of YPN and Yahoo Search Marketing. Guess what – I think you might be able to get this mess fixed, but if you continue to mess around you will lose the support of the webmaster community (if you haven’t already).

Sometimes it takes a little longer to see success. In my case it took 2 months. On August 1, 2007 I published a review for dedicated servers at Liquidweb on one of my websites. Within the first 2 weeks of publishing the review I apparently referred several customers to Liquidweb, but did not know about it until today. I had signed up for the affiliate program, but then forgot about it. Today I received an email that I had generated sales and would receive a payment this month. So, I finally found my login information and checked my account with them. The numbers I saw are looking good. Very good actually and I am already working on how to expose this potential revenue stream a little more. Apparently my review was good enough to transform visitors into buyers and that makes it easier for me. All I have to worry about now is to drive more traffic to that particular web page. More traffic will hopefully result in more referral fees for me.

Even better for me – my log files are containing several keywords and key phrases for Liquidweb related searches. I can use those now to optimize the web page and eventually even build a PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing campaign around it. I also want to contact Liquidweb after having more referrals generated to see if they can offer some coupon codes for me. I’d rather take a smaller payout if I can increase signups by offering discount offers. This topic will certainly show up more often in this blog over time if I am able to reproduce the success.

In case you are wondering why I had only sales in August. Well, the website moves older topics off the home page and into a less visible spot. But by promoting that particular web page a little more I hope to bypass that issue. Eventually I will write another review with a different take on Liquidweb’s services. So, hang on tight …..