Web traffic from spelling mistake

Today I just realize that, one of my popular pages, http://money.softbath.net/stock, has a big spelling mistake which I dont intend to do so !

The correct keyword should be "Hang Seng index" which is the stock market Index in hong kong. But I spell it wrongly and use "Heng seng index" instead.

Surprisingly, I check the site stat and find that much of the traffic comes from this wrong keyword ! It was amazing to grap these traffic by accident.

I know wrong spelling keyword has been some special common practice in search engine marketing, but I have never tried it. Now I was inspired to use more of this technique on purpose to see if I could gain some extra traffic from it...
:P

Google Teaches Bloggers How To Rank

From performancing.com, they have a chance to interview the senior google engineer. They gave the reader some great tips to help them rank well in google. I think the tips dont just apply for blogs, but generally all web pages will benefit from it. Here is the tips:

• "I wouldn't bother with year/month/day in blog urls;"


• "I'd just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url."


• "Don't try to rank for a huge phrase at first--pick a smaller niche and get to be known as an expert there, and then build your way out and up. "


• "Controversial posts are sure to build links, but too many controversial posts may undermine your credibility. I think you attract more links with a conversational style, humor, and doing your own research to produce new insights or tidbits of info."


• "In my opinion, just commenting on other blogs isn't as useful. There are a lot of ways to build a reputation, from having a great blog to producing a unique service to speaking at conferences."


• "A single creative idea that catches fire in the blogosphere or digg.com is probably more useful than just chasing/buying/trading links. Original information or research is great bait to attract links. :)"

Original article here

google reveal revenue share

It used to be a mistery, adsense publishers never knows about how much commission rate they are receiving from google. Now the secret is over --- about 78.5% !!

From a recent article from NYT: "Google's Shadow Payroll Is Not Such a Secret Anymore". Google has revealed its share of earnings from adsense campaign:

"for every dollar the company brings in through AdSense and other places that distribute its ads, it pays roughly 78.5 cents back to sites like Digital Point that display the ads."

This roughly matches the estimation of webmasters. Adsense has been very successful to turn traffic into cash. Before that few people are making money from websites. Thanks to google adsense, a lot of PPC companies including yahoo and msn are soon going to have site targeted ads. This has brought a new potential internet market to the world. Advertisers are willing to pay as high as USD$30 for a single click. Some people think it is a bubble, but it just keep growing and so profitable no one wants to quit....

--
Original article from NewYorkTimes

Page optimization for search engines

optimize your page for better result ranking

The main reason of SEO is to improve the ranking of the result pages. The formula of evaulating the importance of a page on a search keyword keeps changing upon different search engines. But there is a general practice that we should follow:

Use of Heading Tags

properly use <h1><h2><h3> to emphasis the central idea of your paragraph. Search engine likes them. If you use CSS and specifies large and bold fonts, visually you may get the same effect but search engine may not know the importance of your keywords.

Friendly Url

Use descriptive url and make it a static page. Avoid dynamic page with querystrings. According to google, querystring with name "id" would be banned and not indexed by its search engine.
A descriptive url can help search engine easily understand what category you page belongs to, they will reward you with better rankings.

Title

Title field is a very important factor in SEO. It is generally good practice to put your target keywords into the title tag. But dont excess your keywords, it would hurts you. Just keep it natural.

Meta tag

Google nowadays does not take care of meta tags. But yahoo still gives it a value. It is not a bad idea to stick some of your keywords there.