Reviewer of Sites

I’m sure you’re all aware that Amazon has an affiliate program and you can make upwards of 10% commission just for having people order products via your Amazon product links.

You may also know about the aStore feature in which you can easily create as many as 100 stores and host them on Amazon. A better option is to embed the aStore in one of your sites via an Iframe tag. The Iframe code is easily available when you are editing your aStore.

The beauty of all of this is that it is all easy to do, doesn’t require any shipping headaches from running your own store, and that there are millions of Amazon customers that won’t be put off when they are ready to checkout. The aStores show a “Powered by Amazon” logo, which would instill a level of trust in your customer.

So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and make a few aStores and add some Amazon product links to your blogs! It’s all free for you!

First, join Amazon Associates

Once you are registered, you will be able to begin building aStores. You can literally build an aStore in as little as 15 minutes! Although, I’d recommend taking more time, just to make it right.

Click here to Build an aStore

Once you’ve created your aStores, add your store to this free Amazon/aStore directory You do need to be a Squidoo member (remember, Squidoo pays you because they are a revenue sharing site).

If you’re not a Squidoo member yet, please click the logo

To make adding your links even easier, you can use this Firefox addon to easily add Amazon product links. The tool will give you the link in either html or as a simple url. It will include your Amazon Associates ID in the link. Very nice!

Tags: Affiliate by reviews
27 Comments »

A new feature that Google announced is that when you do a search for a person’s name, a recent quote may appear above the search results.  Google is making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics.

Maybe eventually Google will put the quotes into an RSS feed for blogs and sites about these people.  Pretty cool!

Tags: Google by reviews
16 Comments »

Google keeps coming up with new features and you can check them out on their Google Labs area.

The latest features include:

Alternate views for search results – You can do a variety of search types including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types.

With these views, Google’s technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Keyword suggestions – You can view different keywords to improve your search results. As you type your search, Google’s technology will provide alternative suggestions to your queries in real time. *This could be helpful in coming up with good keywords for SEO as well!

Keyboard shortcuts – Navigate search results quickly and easily, minimizing use of your mouse. Current keyboard shortcuts include:

Key Action
J – Selects the next result.
K – Selects the previous result.
O - Opens the selected result.
/ - Puts the cursor in the search box.

Tags: Google by reviews
8 Comments »

Google recently announced that they can now crawl data submitted via forms.

The other part that I found interesting is that they apparently can “scan” javascript and Flash to find links. Previously, spiders were not able to crawl javascript, but this “scanning” now allows for data retrieval. That’s big news! All those links that I thought were useless because they were displayed via javascript may count for something now!

Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a

element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

Tags: Google, Link Building, SEO by reviews
No Comments »

SEO – Regional Targeting for Geographically Specific Traffic (geotargeting)

How does one target a specific geographic region/country/city?

There are a few areas of SEO and marketing that you can do to improve your site ranking within a particular region, known as ‘geotargeting’. The biggest challenge would be ranking well in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) across a range of regions. It would probably require several regional campaigns.

1. Domain TLD: You can register your domain with a country specific TLD, such as “.co.uk”. This should help you rank better in the UK. The same can be done for other countries.
2. Hosting: This is a major factor, if web host server is located in France, then you are likely to rank well in France. Unfortunately, you may not rank well for search engine users in other countries. You should look around for webhosts from that area, for example: you can be hosted on a Maui server, if you are targeting a Maui audience.
3. Languages: If your site includes more than one language, you will have a better chance of ranking well within countries where that language is spoken.
4. Keywords Usage: If your website has too much content for “German”, as apposed to the “UK”, then the search engines may perceive this as the website is targeting the location mentioned in the content. I do not believe in keyword density as being of any value, but I do believe that including the keywords within the content would be relevant.
5. On page/site SEO: Create individual pages or sections of your website for the area you are targeting. Your efforts should then focus the traffic to these pages/areas. This includes link building, advertising, and other means to direct traffic and improve your rank in the SERPs.
   
6. Localized Link Building: Find local bloggers and websites (government city, state, country too!) and see if they’d link to you. Even better, see if they would write an article or two about your site or services.
7. Create a network: Buy domains and host them on localized webhosts. Create original, good content and point them to your main site. You may even get some referral traffic from them as well.
8. Google Local Business Center: By using the Google Local Business Center, you are also narrowing your site down to local areas.
   

   Use the Local Business Center to create your free listing. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they’ll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even coupons to print out and bring to your shop. It’s easy, free, and you don’t need a website of your own.

[Read more →]

Tags: Advertising, Link Building, Marketing, SEO, Web Hosting by reviews
20 Comments »

Google Alerts: How to Use it to Track Backlinks

If you’re not using this, it’s worth giving it a try. The purpose for this is to have notification when new links to your site are found by Google. This can be very good for any linkbuilding campaign.

Click Here: Google Alerts

The search terms should be similar to any one or all of the following:

link: http://www.example.com <— notice the space between link: and http?
link:http://www.example.com
link:www.example.com
link:http://example.com

The question has been asked, “what does the space do?” It’s strange, but it does bring up different results of backlinks, so it’s worth using this modification. Why there is a difference, I have no idea.

It’s very handy for watching progress of Google picking up new links to your sites.

You can set the frequency to:

• as soon as it happens
• once per day
• once per week

Also, it can be set it for Blogs, news, web, etc.

What is the maximum number of alerts I can create?

You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address. Please remember that you can only have up to 10 unverified Alerts at any given time.

Tags: Google, Link Building, Marketing, SEO by reviews
13 Comments »