Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for you. Your website’s visibility can be improved in Google’s search results with its help. It informs webmasters about how Google is interacting with their website. It’s free to use, just like Google Analytics.

The first thing you’ll need is a Google account. If you use other Google services, you can use the same login. If not, you can sign up for a free.

Once you add your sites (yepp, sites – you can add as many as you want) to the Dashboard, each site have to be verified. If you can’t verify your site, Google won’t be able to get an insight.

You can check how Google crawls and indexes your website, when your site was last crawled and which pages are already indexed by it.

The Overview page shows you how many errors Google noticed. You can check restricted and unreachable URLs and you can see the broken links which lead to 404 error pages. You also can find the referrer sites where these links are. I hope you feel how powerful it is – you can fix any problems that prevent Google from indexing your pages.

If you have broken links that are coming from inbound links, a 301 redirect can be setup on your site to fix the problem as soon as possible. It’s sometimes easier and quicker than trying to contact the referrer site to update the link.

Google displays restricted URLs as errors. Some pages are restricted by the robots.txt file for a reason (e.g. you don’t want your redirected affiliate link to get indexed or you want to prevent duplicate content) and you don’t need to fix them.

The Statistics page is where Google tells you how it sees your site, which top search queries drive traffic to your site, etc. Top search queries are phrases people looked for and Google displayed your site in the results. This is great information about how people are searching and how they’re finding your site. You can see phrases you never think of 

One of my favourite parts is the What Google sees area where you can understand what Google thinks of your site and how it see your content. This is where you can find the reason your site can’t rank well for certain keywords. You can view comprehensive data about your internal and external links to your site.

You can upload an XML sitemap to help Google crawl all of your pages and to learn which pages are the most important to your site. You can specify your preferred domain name. You can choose how you would like to see your domain name in Google’s search results.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource to see how Google is interacting with your site. You can learn more about the issues, the linking structure, the keywords people use. If you don’t know why your site doesn’t appear on the first page on Google, this tool might help you detect what is the problem.

Are you using Google Webmaster Tools? Is it useful for you?

Most of the websites can be accessed by typing the domain name with www (like http://www.fatbanker.com) and without www (like http://fatbanker.com).

Try to avoid using both of them. Choose the one you prefer and stick with it because if you have a preferred domain and you promote this one, Google doesn’t have to give separate PageRank for URLs that point to the same site.

Opinions differ. Someone says use your domain with www because most people type URLs starting with it, others use it without www because it’s something like a subdomain. Choose whichever you think is best for you, just make sure you only use one format from the beginning.

Add a 301 redirect using mod_rewrite

Once you have selected your preferred domain, you can force everyone to use that domain. Simply add a 301 redirect with Apache’s mod_rewrite. It’s necessary to create or edit your existing .htaccess file. You will find it in your sites root folder – usually located in public_html folder.

If there is already an .htaccess file, create a backup.

Prefer your domain with www?

If you prefer to use www before your domain, you can copy and paste the following code to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.fatbanker\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.fatbanker.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Of course you will need to replace fatbanker.com with your site URL. Now when your surfers access a URL like http://yourdomain.com they will be redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com. The above code redirects all yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com including directories and files. E.g. yourdomain.com/contact.html will be redirected to www.yourdomain.com/contact.html.

Prefer your domain without www?

If you want everyone visiting your website to do this without www in the URL, simply add the following lines to your .htaccess and upload it to your server:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]


The above code redirects all www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com.

Some hosting provider might not show the .htaccess file or have them in read only mode. In this case you can ask them to set the 301 redirect. They will help you.

If you mess up your current .htaccess settings, you may get a 500 server error code when you try to access your site. In this case just upload the previously backed up file.

Let Google know about your decision

It’s time to tell Google which domain format you want to see in the search results.

Login to your existing Google Webmaster Tools account (or register for free) and set your preferred (canonical) domain. Some days later you will see that all of your pages are displayed in the format you wanted to see in the search results.

It’s great, everyone uses your preferred format and you ensure linking consistence. Having 50 incoming links to the preferred domain will receive more weight than having 20 inbound links pointing to your site with www and 30 links without www in URL. In the second case you present Google with two pages.

Are you using your domain with or without www?

Have you ever tried to purchase the product you’re selling (or pre-selling)? The pre-sell is very important because it gives you a chance to convince the surfer that this product is the perfect choice and he needs it now. But no matter how good you are at convincing your visitors and how good is your conversion rate, if they don’t know how to buy, you will lose sales.

If the merchant is making the process difficult, the prospects’ may give up without buying anything. Check the following 7 points on the merchant’s site, check the process of buying before you start working on your site and your content.

1. Page loading. Are the pages loading quickly? Once your visitors click on one of your great CTA, they are ready to buy the product. They need to get to the merchant page immediately or they become bored. Maybe they give up. Heavy use of flash can kill your commissions.
2. Trust. Can you trust the merchant? Most people are still cautious when buying online. It’s important to give the potential customer every reason to trust the merchant. An address, a phone number, a privacy policy, a clear return policy can help a lot. Another good way to inspire confidence is an SSL certificate, because every credible merchant offer secured order form using encryption technology. Merchants must do everything possible to make prospects feel safe about buying something from a total stranger on the Internet.
3. Site structure. Can you find the order form easily and hassle-free? Won’t believe, but there are sites where you need magnifier to find the purchase button. A link with a clear CTA from every page on the site can reduce the chances of losing prospects. The more difficult the website to use, the less people will buy.
4. Phone order. If you can buy via phone, is your tracking code visible on the site? Does the telephonist ask for the tracking code during the order process? The reliable affiliate networks wouldn’t let you lose sales via phone order.
5. Required information. Do you feel you’re wasting your time while you’re filling out the order form? One of the biggest mistakes merchants make is asking too much information. They shouldn’t waste the prospects’ time asking for things they don’t need to know.
6. Clear prices. You might spend $150 on a product, but when you find out the shipping is $100 on top of that, you’re unlikely to continue the sale. With an IP to Country database it’s easy to work out where a user is from and show them the delivery cost.
7. Multiple payment options. How can you pay? Does the merchant offer multiple payment options? The more options offered, the better your chances of covering your visitors’ needs. Some people love to use their Credit Cards, some may prefer PayPal, and others want to send cheque. If they won’t be able to pay, it wasn’t worth your hard work.

You work so hard to get your customers visit the product’s or service’s site with they credit card in their hand. It would be very pitiful if you sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he is ready to pay.

Do you know any other point that can make you lose sales?

When you look for a web hosting company, they will usually promote the amount of space, bandwidth and their web hosting uptime. Most companies offer a guaranteed uptime to show off their service reliability.

Web hosting uptime is a measurement of the time a server has been running. Uptime is important to not only the hosting companies but to anyone who has a website. The availability of your website is a major concern. What if a potential buyer just read a great article linking to your site, clicked on the link and found an unavailable site? You lose sales. The cost of the downtime can amount to hundreds of dollars.

Most of the web hosting providers offer 99,9% uptime. What this 99,9% uptime means to you? For a 30 day month it means less than 1 hour when your site is unavailable. Please understand that no web hosting company can have a 100% uptime guarantee. Always look for 99,9%, 99,99% or 99,999% uptime and read (and save a copy of) their terms carefully. Can your web hosting provider give back the losses their downtime caused?

If your website experiences downtime, contact the customer service department to ask when your site will be back. If downtimes occur too many times, look for a different company with a higher uptime.

Can you imagine your site is down while there are many customers, potential buyers ready to purchase any product or service from your site? If you are not sitting in front of your computer 24 hours a day (I suppose you need some sleep), how do you notice your site experiences downtime?

That’s simple. Keep monitoring your website or server by using an uptime monitoring service. One of the monitoring services is Web Service Guard.

Let me tell you what they can do for you:

• Web Service Guard let you know when your site is unavailable for any reason. You receive real time alerts so you can fix the problem or contact the support immediately.
• There is no software to install, they can monitor any website. Web Service Guard provides independent third party monitoring services.
• Unlike other monitoring services which have keep the monitoring statistics for 30 days, Web Service Guard stores and provides details of outages for a full year.
• WebServiceGuard tracks and logs all event failures and generates historical uptime metrics. These system uptime metrics are available 24 hours a day.

You can keep monitoring your website uptime for free. Get rid off the lost online sales and low conversion rate caused by downtime and claim your free membership now!

Bounce rate is used in website traffic analysis to represent the percentage of visitors who come to your site and immediately leave without visiting any of the inside pages. Everyone wants this number to be as low as possible because we want our visitors to stay longer on our website.

How do you know what your bounce rate is? The simplest way is register for a free Google Analytics account, list your site and paste some HTML code on your pages. Analytics will you provide free in-depth reports.

Some web analytic software (just like Google Analytics) helps you to find out what bounce rate should be considered as normal. For static websites anything under 40% and for a blog or websites with lots of outbound links from 50% to 60% should be normal.

Is your bounce rate higher than it should be? I’ll show you 5 ways to lower it.

1. Provide good content
   Maybe the most important. Many of us put too much time and energy into the design of the site and not enough into writing effectively. Not giving the surfers what they are looking for is the best way to get them to leave your site immediately. Content is king!
2. Make sure your website loads quickly
   You have seconds to grab your visitors’ attention. It’s really important to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible. Optimize your site – don’t use too many or heavy images or Flash. Choose a reliable host.
3. Make your pages easily available
   Keep your navigation simple, clean, easily readable and user-friendly. Make sure your site is easy to use and well-organized. If your visitors can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they will leave your site. Surfers are impatient. They need information right now.
   Make sure you use the same menu on the whole website and provide an easy way to get back to your home page. This might sound like a no-brainer, but many folks get it wrong.
4. Use internal links
   Give people internal links (links that are pointing to other pages of your website) that will lead them to other pages of your site. Make sure you are linking to other pages that are relevant to the page you are linking from.
   Using good anchor text will help you. Let your anchor texts grab your visitors’ interest and let them dive further into your content. Never use click here – nobody will see it.
5. Take note of traffic sources
   Where is the majority of your traffic coming from? Direct links, search engines, social networking sites? The quality of the traffic will contribute the overall bounce rate being higher or lower. The more targeted your traffic is, the lower your bounce rate. Focus on traffic source that convert better.

Bounce rate is an important measure of your website’s effectiveness. There are also people who believe it plays a role in how search engines rank your site. If it is true it gives you some extra motivation in working on improving it.

If your site has been loosing visitors as fast as they enter, it’s time to make the necessary modifications on your site and then give it a few weeks to see the difference. The difference should be that your visitors will be staying on your website for longer periods of time. Run tests to see if it improves over time.

Are you using Google Analytics? What is your bounce rate? Are you satisfied with it? Do you know how people interacting with your website?

Now you know how to get your website indexed within 24 hours. It’s time to let search engines know about the other pages. The more pages get picked up by them, the better.

How can you help them to spot your whole site? Here are 5 tips:

1. Make your pages accessible.
   Each and every page should have at least one link pointing to it. You can write great articles and you can provide interesting, unique contents – if there is no link, nobody will find it. Make sure your pages are easily accessible. Link from your homepage to the pages to get your entire website crawled faster.
2. Create a sitemap.
   You can create a sitemap that contains links to every page of your site. Place a link to your sitemap page from the homepage. This map can also help your visitors to get familiar with your site.
3. Avoid variables in the URLs.
   Search engines don’t like variables in URLs (like http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?var1=somevars&var2=854). It’s a fact. They don’t index all of this kind of pages if any. You can easily get rid of them with mod rewrite. You can also make your URLs search engine and user friendly.
4. Use internal links.
   The more ways search engines can find your pages, the better. If you’re blogging, you can always link back to your previous posts. It helps Google locate your post and bring more traffic to that post. Internal links can also reduce the number of visitors who leave your site immediately after reading your page. Use them to lower your bounce rate.
5. Get links to the deep pages.
   Everybody knows we need inbound or incoming links from other websites. If an incoming link is not pointing to the home page but another page that is deeper in your site, it helps search engines to discover that page.

   It’s the so called deep linking. When you build links for your site, try to get links that point to different pages and not just to your home page. Don’t forget to use good anchor texts when deep linking.

Google doesn’t index all of your pages (maybe 50-70% of it). The 5 tips above can help you increase the amount of the indexed ones. Always make sure the spiders can find your site from different places.

Let me know if any of the above helped you to increase the number of your pages listed in search engines. Do you know any other technique? Just leave a comment.

I received a $117 commission today from one of the visitors I sent from a 4 days old website. What is so great about it? Well, that I haven’t set up any PPC campaign. The buyer was coming from Google. Was I lucky?

I saw many of the website owners are complaining about their sites are not indexed on the first week/month. My sites are always listed on the major search engines within 24 hours…

Did you do anything to get indexed? Do you have any backlink that can be followed by search engines? You don’t need any special software. All you need is what you have – a PC/notebook, Internet access and 15 minutes.

Sounds pretty strange, huh?

So, you’ve built your website – uploaded to your server and now are waiting for traffic. You need traffic as soon as possible because your site has a lot of unique and precious content.

Here is what I’m doing to get listed on the SEs on the very first day: I’m using the power of social bookmarking/networking sites.

Social networking sites are one of the best ways to appear in the SEs. These sites are crawled every few minutes by Google and its friends. Whenever you submit your pages you get picked up by them within hours. I (and Google) really like the following ones:

Digg.com
Delicious.com
StumbleUpon.com
BlinkList.com
Propeller.com
ReddIt.com
Fark.com
Furl.com

Using the right keywords during submission can help you getting more targeted visitors. Submit your story/article with as many related tags as you can. Tags are used in these social bookmarking sites to categorize stories.

Don’t forget. The more backlinks you have, the quicker you get indexed by search engines because the bots have more leads to get at your site with. The more links you have, the more interesting your site must be. Because of this search engines allow you to climb higher in the search engine rankings.

Now, it’s easy to get indexed by Google and the others. The next step is to get a higher position in the search results for your keywords…

Do your sites get indexed faster with the help of the sites and technique above? Do you know any other method we should use to speed up the process or anything that can bring visitors from the first day? Let us know.

I sold one of my domains on Sedo (for $60 – what a shame) yesterday. The buyer has submitted the payment and I should prepare for the domain transfer.

It’s my first domain regsitered on GoDaddy that I want to transfer out. I’ve logged into my GoDaddy account and turned the locking function of my domain off. It was easy…

Previously I just pushed domains to Sedo’s GoDaddy account. It was faster and easier. But this time we transfer the domain to the buyer so we need the EPP code (also called authorization code) for this domain. The buyer needs this information to transfer the domain name into his/her possession.

Finding your GoDaddy domain’s EPP code isn’t so easy. It seems they don’t want me to transfer my domains out It took me more than 20 (precious) minutes to find that **** link.

Once you are logged in to your GoDaddy account, go to your domains overview and click on the domain you want to transfer. There is a link at the bottom of the left column saying “Authorization Code: Send By Email”. Click on the link and they send an email with your authorization code to the administrative contact email address for your domain. Look at the image below:

GoDaddy is a good registrar but I don’t really like their upselling style and looking at Danica every time I go there Anyway their support is great and I like their auctions where you can buy second-hand domain names for $5.

I hope this post will help you save your time.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to start making money online. It’s easy to find a profitable niche and affiliate programs that offer products you want to promote. Then you can start an online business with minimal investment. Your startup investment may be registering your domain name and paying for a hosting plan.

I think affiliates must have their own web site designed for a specific niche. You can earn revenue without it but you can (and will) multiply your earnings by having one. I also mentioned before that some of the affiliate networks (most of the CPA networks) required you to have your own website.

Affiliate URL vs. Your Domain

If you only promote your affiliate links, you will lose sales. People need easy to remember and short domains. They would never type in an address like http://www.trackingsite.com/?ref=8555412&pid=10257855&sid=7151521. Affiliate URLs are complicated and almost impossible to remember so people will try the www.trackingsite.com URL. If you’re lucky, cookies will save your commission. Are you lucky enough?

Consider you have your own website with a simple and catchy domain name. People will remember it and they will follow the links from your site. And yepp, it makes you money.

Affiliate links vs. Redirects

You can save some of your sales with redirection techniques.

What is not looking natural (and our affiliate links are definately not…) is looking suspicious. People don’t like to click on affiliate links and some of them make sure they access the site without using your affiliate link. They will not click on that scary link.

You will get more clicks on your redirected link (www.yoursite.com/youroffer/) than on your affiliate link. I’m sure.

Track your visitors – Increase your conversion rates

If you are serious enough, you want to carefully monitor your visitors. You want to know where they are coming from, how they can find you, what keywords they are using etc.

Having your own website and a free Google Analytics account makes it easy to track your traffic. It will allow you to check which keywords are driving traffic and wich terms are causing your visitors to leave your site. It also helps you adjust your strategies to increase your conversion rates.

Sell more affiliate products

Almost forgot the best… Your site provides you a place where you can promote all of your affiliate products (within one or a few niches). Your visitors can also buy other products once they are on your site. (E.g. You can set up comparison pages and give your customers what they want. They will be more than happy )

If you have your own site, your possibilities are endless and you have complete control over your projects. (E.g. I like to build review pages for different products. This way, I can presell my visitors on a product before I redirect them to the sales page.)

It costs you less than $10 per month and you can host more than one (so called additional or addon) domain per account. Does anyone here earn huge amounts from affiliate programs without having a website?

If you would like to reduce your startup costs, you can host your site free for 3 months. 3 months is enough to receive your first payments;)

After the catchy headline I have to tell you that the free offer is only for 3 months. But it’s free and everyone likes free things.

As I mentioned around a week ago I recommend to get your own website with your own domain. If you promote an affiliate program, one of the things you have to consider is having your own website.

Having your own website makes you look more professional and costs you less than $10 per month. And now here is your chance to get 3 months of Jumpline hosting for free.

Let’s see… What do you get with this free Jumpline offer?

• 10 GB disk space what is more than enough for 10-20 websites! Simply amazing.
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• An average website is around 1MB. With 500 visitors daily (that’s more than enough you to earn $100 per day) you need around 10-15GB of monthly data transfer. Jumpline offers 100 GB monthly data transfer for you!
• I’m sure you want to look professional, so you need your own email accounts, just like yourname@yourdomain.com. You can have up to 100 of these kind of email accounts.
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• The availability of your webtime is a major concern. Jumpline offers 99.99% server uptime – for a 30 day month it’s less than 5 minutes when your site is unavailable. Please note there is no web hosting provider can have 100% uptime.

It sounds good. But is it really free?

Yepp, you are not required to make a purchase. You have the option to cancel the free offer at anytime and you will not be billed after the free offer expires. You can simply cancel the free offer inside your online Customer Manager.

Your free web hosting account will be set up within a few hours. Jumpline can assist you in transferring your domain name to their nameservers.

You will have access to 24/7 email ticket support. You will also receive toll free phone support Monday-Friday 9am-9pm.

Jumpline.com requires a valid credit card to secure the free hosting offer. However you will not be billed unless you choose to keep the webhosting service after the free offer expires in 3 months. You must cancel the trial before then.

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