I’m not saying that their algorithms, and engines are as powerful as Bing or Google but many of the rules you apply for those you should be looking at for social media, Twitter especially. Content, links, both very important.

First on the plate is content. While you’re not going to have as much content as say a blog, there are still general rules to follow when posting on a social networking site. Keep it all relevant, and make it engaging. When someone becomes a fan on Facebook, or follows you on Twitter there’s a reason. It’s because they find your content engaging, and worth having a look at on a regular basis.

Be creative, which honestly to me is more important in the social world than the search world. When someone searches a word on Twitter, all sorts of non-sense is going to pop up in their face. Make sure your content is what they want to see, and be more engaging than the other guy.

Obtaining links is a bit trickier than content. Most of your visits are going to be obtained by friending, or following others. If you’re not a personable person then definitely learn to adopt an online persona. People want to follow someone who is interesting, is friendly and trustworthy.

There are numerous ways to keep that conversion rate up. Below is a video of Dr. Karl Blanks, who is the Co-Founder of Conversion Rate Experts. He provides some useful tips on how-to up your conversion rates…

-Always find out why you’re not converting, through surveys or contacting your users. Finding out why you aren’t successful is just as important as making the change.

- Changes must always be tested. It’s not enough to just change your site, you have to keep an eye on the change in comparison to your old style.

You can find more useful tips in the video…

[via: WebProNews]

If you’re to believe some experts, then you need to start focusing on localization and personalization. It’s not enough to just dominate keyword phrases, and rank. Slowly, you can start to see search engines adapt more and more to people’s location and preferences. For example, if you have a website selling video games and someone types phrases into Google about video games perhaps the top hits will be local gaming stores in their area.

Also, search engines are become more personable. They’re adapting to users and providing more results based on history and preference. A prime example is the ‘promoting’, and ‘demoting’ feature on Google. If people are becoming engaged in your site, then features like this will provide more repeat visits than before.

The most important question you should be asking is, ‘How Do I Take Advantage Of This Change?’

Taking advantage of localizing can be a tricky endeavor. Depending on the content of your site, it can be easy to localize or not. If you own a site about outdoor activities. Then you can write about local events, or setup a network partnership with a local park.

Personalizing is a bit easier, and no matter your content should always be on top of you priorities. There’s numerous ways to make your site personal, and engaging to the user. Having some form of communication between you and the users, and the users with each other is a must. You don’t want to be a one stop website. There has to be a reason for your viewers to keep returning to your site. If they have a place to engage with others on a topic, then that’s instant return right there.

There’s traditional ways to personalize; setting up a blog, creating a forum. If you really want to get creative then allow your members to provide the content. Allow of user-generated reviews of products, have guest authors. People love to feel important, and if you can make them feel like a part of your website then you hit two birds with one stone. Content being generated, and garnering good feelings from your users.

Yes. People are out inflating their FeedBurner count. Last time I showed you guys how people fake their AdSense earnings. This time it’s the number of readers blogs have. Everyday that goes by something new pops up. Someone always finds a way to cheat the system.

It seems all you need to do to fake your reader count is create an OPML file, add your feed’s URL as many times as you want separated by lines, then all that’s left is to import it to NetVibes. Every line that has your feed’s URL counts as one reader. Isn’t that something?

This is extremely easy to do and it means you can literally go from 40 readers to a couple thousand over night. That’s not cool. I hope FeedBurner takes care of the issue before it gets out of hand.

The guys over at TheNextWeb found out about this and made a video showing you exactly how it’s done. Check out the video to better understand:

Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.

This does nothing but make it easier for sites to make themselves look credible when they’re not. Before this came along the only way to manipulate your reader count was by either copying someone else’s or by creating a bunch of email accounts.

But none of the ways made it as credible as this one. With this OPML file stuff people can actually use a screen-recorder to show their FeedBurner account and trick people into believing it’s their real count–but it’s not.

Hopefully FeedBurner will soon fix the problem.

Yup. That’s right. You read what you thought you read. To think all this time your favorite “guru” could have been tricking you all along. I’m not saying all these people are faking their AdSense earnings–no, but I bet a lot of them were, and a lot of them still are. The ones that “were” I can only imagine went with the saying “fake it till you make it” which is probably why they did what they did–fake their AdSense earnings.

I took a screen capture from one of the many white background, long sales copy websites claiming to make you a millionaire in no time.

Landing pages decorated with catchy, and sticky copy-write were usually flooded with “proof” that looked something like this:

The above is what most of us were impressed by at some point or another in our search for financial freedom by means of the Internet. Although plenty people did achieve such numbers not everyone can. A lot of people found ways around actually earning the money and came across a way to make it seem like they did, then used that as a badge of “proof” in order for potential consumers to trust them and purchase their “product”, in hopes of making their money in that manner–hence the “fake it till you make it” saying.

How can you be so sure they are fake?

Now this does not mean these are fake; they could or could not be. My point is I can show you how someone could easily manipulate what their AdSense earnings look like. And not just AdSense earnings, but any type of earnings be it: Commission Junction, PayPal accounts, Clickbank, Bank account balance–ANYTHING.

But referring to this picture in particular you can notice the clicks and CTR %’s are being blocked from view. I can make an educated guess on why these are fake AdSense earnings. That guess is: If you do the math, the clicks, and CTR % doesn’t add up mathematically with the earnings i.e., they’re fake.

note: AdSense terms of service requires this to be blocked from view, so there is just as good a chance they can be real earnings.

I didn’t write this post to encourage, or inspire someone to do such things. I actually frown upon those who need to lie to get where they are; such action would imply one could not be capable of doing it without lying, and that’s just lack of character in my opinion.

With that said, I will continue with this reminder: I am revealing this so my readers can avoid being fooled by scam artist who use the tactic I’m about to reveal. I highly suggest that no one go out and use this to their advantage; it is selfish, deceiving, and flat out wrong.

I can’t take it! What is it already?

It’s fairly a very simple process, and it’s probably why people abuse of it. To start off you can go to any website. You can use mine as a test dummy.

Go to your browser and clear it. Erase the URL in your browser.

Done? Good!

Now TYPE this code in your browser:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable=’true’; document.designMode=’on’; void 0

note: you should type it into your browser; not copy and paste.

Now hit enter. Voila! You’re done!

You can now go anywhere on my site, or whatever site you were on when you did this and select anything to edit . Go ahead . . . try it!

Scroll down to this post, highlight some text, and hit erase . . . what happened?

Feel like re-writing this post?

That real bad thing about this is not only does it work for manipulating AdSense earnings, it works for manipulating anything. You can pretty much change what someone said, take a screen capture, and make it look like a person wrote something they didn’t. It really is an evil trick. However, I must keep my readers informed to protect them from such evil; which is why I wrote this post.

Update: I was contacted by a couple readers that told me the code wasn’t working when they tried it in their browser, so I made a video showing you guys exactly how it’s done.

note: type the code exactly as is, and make sure there is a space after ‘true’ and then type the semi colon. After the semi colon goes another space right before the word “document”. After ‘on’ there is another space, and then goes a semi colon. After that semi colon there is another space right before the word “void”. After the word “void” there is one last space, then you type the number 0 and hit enter.

Hopefully this video cleared things up for the people it wasn’t working for. Remember to put the spaces where they belong, and everything should work fine.

What increases my PageRank?

What increases PageRank is the sites that are linking to you; the higher their PageRank is the more weight they will pass on to your links. In this case, weight can stand for level of importance. The more links that point to your site, the higher your rank will go up. If the sites that are linking to your site have high ranks, then it will be even easier to get a high rank yourself.

e.g. 10 PR6 sites linking to you are worth way more then 500 PR1 sites linking to you.

What’s the .gov and .edu thing all about?

This brings me back to the weight thing. The same way they’re sites that end with “.com” or “.org”, they’re sites that end with “.gov”, and “.edu”. These “.gov” sites are related to the government, and the “.edu” sites are related to education; Google considers these sites to be of high importance, which is why they give off so much weight and have extremely high PageRank.

In a nutshell, getting several “.gov” and “.edu” backlinks will contribute to your PageRank tremendously, more then just a regular link, or PR6 link for that matter.

OK, OK, I get it. How can I get my hands on some?

The first thing you want to do is find these sites that end in “.gov”, and “.edu”.

The way you do this is by going to Google and typing in any of the following into the search box: inurl:.gov+inurl:blog, inurl:.gov+inurl:blog, inurl:.edu+inurl:forum, and inurl:.edu+inurl:forum.

When you type any of these into the search box in Google, the results will yield a lot of .gov and .edu sites (depending which code you typed in). Notice the codes are looking for blogs and forums that end with .gov and .edu; the reason for this is because you can comment, and place links on forums and blogs–allowing you to link back to your site.

What if they don’t follow?

Well that’s OK. For those who don’t know, follow, in this case means allow links to be indexed by search engine spiders. If a site doesn’t follow then there is pretty much nothing you can do about it. But there is a solution to all of this, and it’s called: Search Status

What’s that?

It’s a FireFox add-on that includes a feature which you can opt to see no-follow links highlighted. This way when you go to a site, you’ll immediately know if they follow, or don’t follow. Click on the link above to download it.

This should help you avoid commenting on sites that will give back no SEO juice. Saving you a lot of time. Seriously, you should definitely take the time out to search for these sites, and leave comments linking back to your site; it will improve your PageRank in due time, and can make your site more valuable if you plan on selling it one day.

If you want to learn more about PageRank and ways on how to increase it, you might want to check out these posts: Importance of backlinks and How to get a PR6 backlink

What’s the problem?

Well the problem is since they’re beginners chances are they are also anxious. If they’re anxious, then chances are they aren’t going to bother reading the Google AdSense TOS (terms of service). This is where the problems begin.

The problem is you can’t, well you can, but you shouldn’t use the service of any company without first looking at their terms of service.

Why not?

Well because you will probably violate one of their terms, and they will end up banning you.

How can I avoid this?

Simple. To avoid being banned from Google AdSense I’ve compiled a list of things you cannot do. If you don’t follow these common mistakes people make, then chances are you won’t be banned from Google AdSense.

Here goes . . .

1. Click on your own ads – this may seem obvious to you, but you won’t believe the number of people who think they can get away with clicking on their own ads – you can’t, so don’t do it.

2. Ask others to click on your ads – again, just like there are geniuses out there who believe Google won’t catch them clicking their own ads, there are also geniuses out there who think getting family members and friends to click their ads will do the trick – it won’t. So don’t do it.

3. Join an “AdSense click ring” – yes. It saddens me to say this, but there are click rings people started in order to make money from AdSense. These rings would consist of a group of people going to each others site and clicking on ads.

4. Create AdSense based website – people make websites with the sole purpose of generating an income from them using AdSense. Well, Google isn’t too fond of this. I suggest creating a
website that serves a purpose to readers and contains some type of value.

5. Placing ads on pages with little or no content – avoid placing your code on a page that doesn’t at least break 300 words.

6. Stuff your page with keywords – “keyword stuffing” your pages is definitely a way to have Google have a fit. You really shouldn’t do this, or over do it would be better put.

*A lot of Mesothelioma pages were banned due to keyword stuffing for this particular keyword, which at one point was one of the highest paying keywords.

7. Use malicious software – use “bots” to automatically click on your ads over and over again.

8. Place your AdSense code on sites that have banned content – such as: porn, gambling, and drugs.

9. Don’t read the Google AdSense terms of service – doing this will surely lead to you doing at least one of the things mentioned above; in effect getting you banned.

If you’re planning on making money with Google AdSense, then avoiding the things above will help you do that. On the other hand if you don’t want to make money with Google AdSense then go ahead and do all of the above – however I don’t recommend it.

Outsmarting Google isn’t the way you’re going to make money online. You can’t outsmart Google. Well you can for some time, but your run will surely be ended with your account being terminated sooner or later.

I suggest reading the Google AdSense terms of service before doing anything at all with your AdSense code. I recommend reading the terms of service for ANY and EVERY service you come across and decide to use.

Affiliate revenue theft, how is this so?

Well here’s the thing, people started to catch on to affiliate marketing and started to become aware of it, and its “affiliate links”.

For some reason people rather pay the owner of the product directly then let someone else earn a profit from it as well (like it makes a difference . . . go figure). Even after a well thought out review was written by the person the product was recommended by.

This person helps you decide if you’re going to buy something or not, and you decide to bypass their affiliate link and give the money straight to the owner of the product.

Why? Who knows?

You’re not giving any more money up. It’s the same thing. My way of looking at it is, why feed one mouth when you can feed two? So yes I click and make purchases through affiliate links because it’s the same either way.

The same amount of money is going to be spent.

Well it just so happens not everyone thinks the same way, so people began to anchor text their links instead (aka make the link a descriptive text), in effect hiding the URL and not displaying it directly.

This didn’t work very long.

What happened?

People started to catch on to another flaw: the status bar, and it’s at the bottom left hand corner of you browser’s window.

Every time you hover your mouse over a link the URL of such link will be shown in the status bar revealing your affiliate link. Again affiliate sales begin to be cut due to the bypassing of affiliate links.

What was the solution?

Well some savvy programmers came up with something called a link cloaker.

This “link cloaker” lets you “anchor text” your affiliate link, and makes sure it doesn’t show up in the status bar whatsoever. This will make sure that your affiliate sales continue to flow in and that nobody is bypassing your affiliate links.

But there’s a catch

I wouldn’t recommend you use this if you’re serious about the site you’re using it on. By “cloaking” links on your site, your site can lose its credibility. It is non user-friendly to have readers click onto the unknown.

If you’re going to use it remember it can damage your credibility.

Proceed at your own will . . .

To use this tool just click on this link Affiliate Link Cloaker.

Just imagine: you go to add a new AdSense code or change a banner, and you accidently erase a <div> tag but you don’t notice. You hit save, view your blog and 1/3 of the page is blank! If you’re not familiar with html, php coding and all that good stuff, it’s going to be while for you to determine it’s a <div> tag your missing let alone where to place it.

Save yourself the hassle and backup your files. If you make a mistake, then poof voila! Back everything up again and it’s all brand new. So here’s 2 ways you can backup your WordPress.

1.) The WP export Feature

Now this feature that already comes in your WP’s dashboard is great if you just want to quickly back up all your posts and pages. You can simply go to your dashboard under “Manage,” then click on “Export” and finally, choose the Author’s post you’re exporting and download the file. You can later go back to your dashboard under “Manage” – “Import.”

2.) WordPress Back Up Plugin

This is the way I do it. With this plugin you simply download, upload, and activate like any other plugin. Then go to the menu, which you can find by going to your WP dashboard and clicking on the “Manage” tab. after that a subtab will come out and you will then see the tab: “Backup”. The plugin automatically selects all default WP files (tables) and gives you the option to select anymore it might find. You can even schedule the plugin to back up your WP under an hourly, daily, or weekly basis.

You can get the plugin here WP Backup Plugin

These are two simple ways for you to backup your database incase anything goes wrong. Even if you feel you won’t make mistakes, servers crash, people get hacked. This is why no matter what you should always backup your database.