Webmaster Blog

Making use of Google Adsense’s ‘Allowed Sites’ whitelist is becoming an increasingly useful tool to webmasters.

Why would anyone want to display your ads on their site? Surely they’d want to earn the cash themselves? Well, obviously there’s something more than the obvious going on.

I speak from experience in recent months whereby my account was receiving a massive amount of invalid (£0) clicks from units with no channels; and since I keep check of all my ads via channels, I knew they were ‘outside’ clicks for whatever reason.

Following that, I also discovered that Shawn Hogan of DigitalPoint had experienced the same thing, where his AdSense account was unfairly suspended due to clicks from disallowed websites. So this brought my theory to proof; people are adding your Publisher ID to their adverts on their blacklisted websites as a form of attack!

So I cannot stress how important it is to use the Allowed Sites feature Google provide. It’s there for a reason, and let’s face it; who in their right mind is going to display your ads without contacting you first, unless it’s malicious? Well it’s unlikely to say the least. And if it was legit, they could let you know to add them to the whitelist – simple!

To access the whitelist simply login to your AdSense account, and navigate to AdSense Setup > Allowed Sites.

Exclusive Tips:
Many people view your websites using Google translate and other Google apps! Adding google.com to the list will not work as the translation program uses a different domain (googleusercontent.com) to access your website. So be sure to add googleusercontent.com to the list so you allow clicks via Google Translate and any other tools under subdomains on that domain!

Any more tips will be added as I discover them!

Popularity: 9%

WordPress is the best blogging software available! My recent studies shine!

I haven’t posted here in a while, and firstly I’d like to apologise for that. And secondly, I’d like to briefly explain what this post is really about.

Eager to improve the experience of this blog, I decided to look into the brains of wordpress and all it stands for, and see if it is truly as good as people say it is.  Before now, I just took people’s word for it – and it turns out I was right to do so – but I wanted to really see what makes it so special.

I’m not going to talk about the usual, ie; Easy CMS, Plugin Systems, Widgets, Admin Panels etc – Instead I looked for what I think really matters to a webmaster.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

WordPress’s SEO URLs are undoubtedly phenomenal, we all know that!  But more so than that, the actual on-page SEO standards really are top-quality.  I guess you could put this partly down to the XHTML compliance – that always helps.  But it’s more than that, the use of perfect header tags, quality navigational links, and the absolutely perfect hierarchy of mark-up, search engines LOVE WordPress!

Without any real off-site SEO, I am high up on page #1 on Google for the search term “Webmaster Blog“, and my position is strengthening.  And the best part is, to achieve this, away from the odd link here and there on forum signatures and blog feeds, I am doing NOTHING but posting content!  Wordpress is a fully automated top-ranker!

Functionality:

There is nothing worse than a dysfunctional website.  Nobody likes to have to ‘figure out’ a website before they can use it.. And with so many competitors around, why bother? “I’m sure another blog will be easier to navigate..” – GONE.  Unless your blog is perfectly functional and navigable, you’d be losing out on a LOT of potentially loyal users.. WordPress offers perfect navigation, perfect functionality, and super-light loads.  Obviously this can be compromised by terrible themes and widgets, but the basic structure of WordPress is unbeatable!  As long as you choose a theme which complements the original structure of WordPress, you’re in business!

Speaking of which, I hope to create or buy (if my budget allows it) a nice new unique theme for this blog – I think it needs it!

My advice to you, as a happy and successful blogger, is go for WordPress!  And with the new WordPress 3 bringing even better functionality, now really is the time to soak up those perks!

Popularity: 7%

This SEO article will explain how to search engine optimise images, and how it can help drive traffic to your website.

Most webmasters do not realise it, but SEO can be implemented with images on your site, and it is a very good idea to do so.

Why? When users search for images and you have images of the searched description, you will more than likely receive at least one visit from that person.

How to SEO your images.

When displaying images on your website, generally you will have something that looks like:

<img src=”http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg” />

Whilst this is fine for showing a picture to your already acquired audience, it’s not bringing you the full potential audience of those people who actually search for those images – even if you give the page a really good title!

So instead of having your standard picture code as shown above, give it an ALT attribute (alternate text).  The true purpose of this is for when the image cannot be displayed, it will show the alternate text instead to give the audience a rough idea of what the image was supposed to be..

BUT it’s true value to you – the webmaster – is how the search engines use it!

Using ALT text on your images allows top search engines like Google to apply a real title to the image.  Okay you might have a post title which the image is relevant to, but the image isn’t necessarily going to be named the same as your post.  So to name it accurately in the eyes of the top search engines, use the ALT attribute.

So how do I SEO my Images?

Well instead of using your standard “<img src=”http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg” />” image code, use this:

<img src=”http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg” alt=”The SEO Title of the Image” /> – obviously replacing “The SEO Title of the Image” with the relevant text to describe your image.  Keep it short though – a paragraph wont help you, think of it as naming a file, it just needs to be a title for the image, but a relevant one.

Now, go get recognised on Search Engine’s Image Searches now by implementing this handy SEO method!

Popularity: 7%

Hooray! Today is a good day!

Why? I have reached page 1 on Google for the keywords: Webmaster Blog!

I have been straining to get on page 1 for a long time, and it seems all that effort has paid off.

Thanks to everyone who has linked to my best articles, I am sure this has no doubt helped a lot

As a celebration I feel I must do something.. So expect some big change or offer here over the coming week!

Thank you all!

Popularity: 6%

“How do I make my Privacy Policy live up to Google’s requirements for AdSense Publishers?”

I get asked this question so much I thought I’d make a post about it.  Lots of people don’t realise what they need to include in a privacy policy to please Google when using the AdSense system.

Well there’s not too much to it.. If you look at my privacy policy you’ll see that I have a very personal approach because I’m a more personal person than most like to be when running websites.  I believe it portrays a more wholesom character.. But most will try to act 100% professional when making privacy policies so heres a template I’ve drawn up for you to use.  You may copy it directly or you can change it to your desires.  Either way, here’s a simple template:

On-Site Advertising

Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our website in order to serve relevant advertisements.

Google’s use of the DART cookie enables the service of advertisements to our users, based on what pages and content you choose to view within our website.

Google offer you the option of removing yourself from this service if you may choose.  You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

I hope this helps many of you create or simply serve an AdSense compliant Privacy Policy for your website.  This template covers the most recent privacy policy update notice you will have recieved sometime in March 2009.

Popularity: 33%

Google PageRank has updated!

This blog has achived PageRank 2, which is great for such a new site!  Hopefully by the next PR update I will have achived great things here which will in turn reward me with a greater PR.

I am going to mess around with a few methods of increasing PR, and will release my methods here as I do so!

I hope you all got the PR you were hoping for.  Having looked around at peoples PR changes, I havent noticed such dramatic increases or decreases this time around! Hopefully this will change for the better next time!

I will post later about methods of increasing PR, so stick around for more information and resources on optimisation for SERPs and PR.

Popularity: 19%

We now have a Google pagerank checker tool!

If you’re not sure how this works, all it involves is you typing in your website’s URL, and it’ll retrieve your PageRank from the almighty Google!

Go to the PageRank Checker page now to check it out! Perhaps check how your sites are doing for PR?

I hope this gets some use… It’s there on a trial basis for now, if nobody uses it (I will be checking the my useage statistics) then I’ll remove it, because I hate things lying around redundant!

Hope you find this useful!

Popularity: 25%