Adsense Search

Refer more articles on SEO series here:
http://mylearningcafe.blogspot.in/2015/04/search-engine-optimization-seo-series.html

What is Adsense Search?
AdSense for search is a free product that lets you to place a Custom Search Engine on your site to provide users with web search.

Refer below steps to setup a search engine in your blog.

• Go to https://cse.google.com/cse/
• Add a search engine for your blog
• Once setup, get the code.

Adding search in your blog right side bar

• Once you have got the code as mentioned above, go to blogger
• Click on Layout
• On the right side bar, click on "Add Gadget"
• Select HTML/Javascript
• Put in a name and put the code
• Click Save

Adding search in your posts (of your blog)

• Get the code as mentioned above.
• Convert the code, using the following URL: http://helplogger.blogspot.com/2012/03/adsense-ad-code-converter.html
• Go to blogger
• Click on Template > Edit HTML
• Make a backup of the HTML
• Search for <data:post.body/>
• Replace <data:post.body/> with

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<<<Insert Your Encoded Adsense Code here>>>
</b:if>
<p><data:post.body/></p>

• Click Save

Adding search in your title header (of your blog)

• Get the code as mentioned above.
• Convert the code, using the following URL: http://helplogger.blogspot.com/2012/03/adsense-ad-code-converter.html
• Go to blogger
• Click on Template > Edit HTML
• Make a backup of the HTML
• Search for <p class='description'><span><data:description/></span></p>
• Put your code below it
• Click Save

Refer more articles on SEO series here:
http://mylearningcafe.blogspot.in/2015/04/search-engine-optimization-seo-series.html

Adsense on blogger

Refer more articles on SEO series here:
http://mylearningcafe.blogspot.in/2015/04/search-engine-optimization-seo-series.html
 

What is adsense?
Adsense is Google's content-targetted advertising program.
One can make money by enabling Adsense on their blog. Relevant ads will be shown on your blog (once approved).

Follow steps below on getting adsense (on blogger):

1. Apply for adsense

• Log into blogger and go to Earnings (n the left side bar menu).
• Click "Sign up for Adsense"
• Complete the application form and await approval.
• Once approved, you will get a confirmation email.
• Go to Earnings section and click on "Yes" for "Show ads on blog"
• Ads will not appear on your blog initially, it may show blank ads for 2 days.

2. Putting ad in the right side bar

• Once approved, go to Earnings > View Dashboard > My ads
• Click on "+New ad unit"
• Select the "Large skyscraper"
• Automatically it will get activated on your blog

3.Getting code for ads on your blog (not the side bar)

• Once approved, go to Earnings > View Dashboard > My ads
• Click on "+New ad unit"
• Select the type of ad you want
• Once selected, click on get code.
• Copy the code.

4. Putting the ads in the Post (below title)

• As per step 3, you have got the code for the ad.
• Convert the code, using the following URL: http://helplogger.blogspot.com/2012/03/adsense-ad-code-converter.html
• Copy the converted code.
• Go to Blogger
• Go to Template
• Click on Edit HTML
• Keep a copy of the HTML code.
• Search for "<data:post.body/>"
• Replace the <data:post.body/> with

 <div expr:id='"adsmiddle1" + data:post.id'></div>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;static_page&quot;'>
<div style="clear:both; margin:10px 0">
<!-- Add here the code of your ad -->
</div>
</b:if>
</b:if>
<div expr:id='"adsmiddle2" + data:post.id'>
<data:post.body/>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var obj0=document.getElementById("adsmiddle1<data:post.id/>");
var obj1=document.getElementById("adsmiddle2<data:post.id/>");
var s=obj1.innerHTML;
var r=s.search(/\x3C!-- adsense --\x3E/igm);
if(r>0) {obj0.innerHTML=s.substr(0,r);obj1.innerHTML=s.substr(r+16);}
</script>

• Put your converted code by replacing the line in the above code <!-- Add here the code of your ad -->
• By default, the ad will appear below the title.
• If you want it at another place, at that place put the following <!-- adsense -->

Refer more articles on SEO series here:
http://mylearningcafe.blogspot.in/2015/04/search-engine-optimization-seo-series.html

SEO Series - Adding your site to search engines

Refer SEO series (list of articles) here

One needs to add their site (blog) to the search engine.This is pro-actively ensuring search engine crawlers (spiders) would check your site (blog).

The below URLs are used to add your site (blog) to the search engines:

• Google
• Bing

This is a basic and first step in SEO techniques.

Stay tuned for more articles on SEO.

Refer SEO series (list of articles) here

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series

Refer to below articles (more will be added with time) on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

Benefits of learning about SEO:

• More traffic to your blog
• More learning (by cross sharing of learning's with subscribers)
• Your blog can rank higher in searches via search engines
• More financial earning potential.

Topics (more will be added with time):

• Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 
• Steps performed by a Search Engine
• SEO Series - Adding your site to search engines  
• Adsense on blogger
• Adsense Search 

SEO Series - Steps performed by a search engine

Refer to SEO series here.

In our previous article on SEO, I had mentioned the following:

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, refers very simple to the strategy and methodology of helping a website rank higher (seen near the top of search engines like Google) on a search return.

What is SEO (search engine optimization)?At its most basic, "SEO" means trying to get your site as high up as possible on search result pages.
This generally means more traffic to your site.
One can define it as a process of trying to make a website appear in a high position when users conduct a search with keywords.

So, to understand SEO, we should first try to understand how do search engines work?I will have more articles on this series soon.

Search engines have two major functions:

• Crawling and indexing documents, articles, images etc
• Return search results with max relevancy and importance (popular)

Steps performed by a search engine (in order):

Crawling:
Simple act of the search engine being able to find your blog and being able to crawl(read) the content.
The tool that does this is known as a spider or crawler.

Indexing:
When a crawler finds your blog, it will try to index the content. This helps it in improving its search while retrieving data for users.

Processing:
Process content and keywords to determine relevancy of the content with respect to the search made.

Relevancy:
Most important aspect where search is considered.
If your blog comes in the first couple of links in google search, you have a high chance of traffic.
Many users never ever go to page 2 in google search at all and hence to get traffic on your page, you need to ensure that your page comes up in the first couple of links in a google search.

Retrieval:
Act of search engine retrieving data for the user.

We will touch upon more aspects of SEO in next articles. 

Refer to SEO series here

Introduction to SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Refer SEO series (list of articles) here

One of the best things of writing a blog is that one constantly learns and upgrades his knowledge.
Knowledge also grows, when people share their experiences.

Today's article is an introduction to SEO (Search engine optimization). It will be the first of the many articles I intend to write on this topic as I learn more on SEO.

Also, I intend to use all of the best practices that I learn in this article (and obviously in the future).

So, what is SEO (search engine optimization)?
At its most basic, "SEO" means trying to get your site as high up as possible on search result pages.
This generally means more traffic to your site.
One can define it as a process of trying to make a website appear in a high position when users conduct a search with keywords.

In upcoming articles, I may go into more details, but to explain in basic terms:
Search engines have two major functions:

• Crawling and indexing documents, articles, images etc
• Return search results with max relevancy and importance (popular)

SEO techniques provide ways that search engines can crawl the site and the site comes up in the search results.

So, how do we go about it? As mentioned, this is an introductory article and we shall have more detailed articles in the future.

Keywords
One should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of his/her site:

• Titles
• Content
• URLs
• Images

Users search based on keywords, and hence keywords, if indexed by search engines, will help to increase a site's relevancy and popularity.
The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords.
Description meta tag gives the search engine a summary of what the page is all about.
Ensure title tag text also appears in the body of the page.

Note: Be judicious in your usage of keywords. If you overdo the number of keywords, you risk your site to be labelled as SPAM by the crawlers/spiders.
Will briefly touch more about this topic when we discuss on SPAM.

Internal Links:
Linking related pages within your site is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages.
Links also make it easier for the crawlers to crawl through your page.
Make the anchor text search-engine-friendly -- keywords linking pages will add to the index and show up in users search results.

Sitemap:
Create a sitemap (a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site).
It makes it easier for spiders to search your site.

Learn more about sitemaps here

Avoid Flash
Avoid using Flash. Avoid Frames and AJAX.
However, if you do use, place text and links around it.

Images and the ALT tag
Crawlers/Spiders crawl though text data. They do not crawl within images (jpg, png etc).
Thus, one needs to ensure that if images are used, the ALT text has a keywords in the description.
This is something that I need to start doing and I will report back on the improvements.

Content
It will help if the content is updated frequently.

Role of Social media
Social media plays an important role in SEO. If there are popular websites which have links to your sites, there is an increased probability for users to click and get redirected to your site.

Kindly note that I am not suggesting that one should SPAM other sites and put in their website links. There is a mutual understanding to help each other and have links to popular sites (as well as have links to your site within the popular sites).

I have pages that I don't want to be crawled.
If you have a specific requirement to avoid crawling of specific pages (typically some internal only pages), one can instruct crawlers/spiders to NOT crawl those URLs (via robots.txt).

• When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled.
• The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled.
• This file may be cached, and hence you sometime may see some pages crawled that you did not want to be crawled.
• Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots.

SEO Techniques:We will try to give a brief introduction to SPAMming via SEO.
Note that the below is just an introduction and we will have follow up articles on the same soon.

SEO techniques can broadly be classified into two types:

• White hat
• Black hat

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception.
The techniques mentioned above are part of white hat technique.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception like:

• Hidden text (either as text colored similar to the background or invisible div tag)
• Providing different page for user based searches and machine based searches (Cloaking)
• SPAMdexing

Cloaking:

• Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser.
• This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.
• When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page
• The purpose of cloaking is sometimes to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed
• They try to trick search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking.

SPAMdexing

• SPAMdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. Some phrases or keywords are repeated deliberately to manipulate the relevance of the page.
• SPAMdexing techiniques are broadly classified into

• Content SPAM

• Keyword stuffing involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count and make a page appear to be relevant for a web crawler.
• Doorway pages are low-quality web pages created with very little content, but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results.

• Link SPAM

• Link spam takes advantage of link-based ranking algorithms, which gives websites higher rankings
• A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs (known as spam blogs).

Refer SEO series (list of articles) here